New Linux User

HOWTO: Use Job Control - Stopping and Resuming Processes

by Jon on May 10th, 2006

One of the most useful of all Linux’s features is the ability to suspend and resume processes. If you’re running a shell process such as the NANO editor and need to quickly get back to the command line without terminating your work, control-z is your friend.

CRTL-Z will stop the active job and push it to the background (sometimes called ‘detaching from the terminal’) so you can do other things:

CTRL-Z
[1]+ Stopped nano

You can stop more than one process and to list them all, type jobs

jobs
[1]+ Stopped nano
[2]+ Stopped nano

To recover the most current job, just type fg. To recover any other job, type the [job number] after fg

fg 2

will recover the second instance of nano.

This is some cool stuff.

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