Chapter 15. Job Control

In this hour you will learn about how Unix handles jobs and how you can manipulate them. Commands you will learn include jobs and ps, to see what processes are running; fg and bg, to move jobs back and forth between the foreground and background; and kill, to terminate jobs you no longer want around.

Goals for This Hour

In this hour, you will learn

  • About job control in the shell: stopping jobs

  • How to put jobs in the background and bring them back to the foreground

  • How to find out what tasks are running by using jobs and ps

  • How to terminate errant processes by using kill

This hour presents an explanation of a Unix philosophical puzzle: What is a running program? To learn the answer, you are introduced to ps and jobs, for controlling ...

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