Slackware Linux Essentials
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Slackware Linux Essentials

Chapter 11 Process Control

11.2 Foregrounding

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If you need to interact with a backgrounded process, you can bring it back into the -foreground. If you've only got one backgrounded process, you can bring it back by -typing:

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-% fg
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If the program is not done running, the program will take control over you terminal -and you will not be returned to a prompt. Sometimes, the program will finish running -while backgrounded. In this instance, you'll get a message like this:

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-[1]+  Done              /bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS
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That tells you that the backgrounded process (in this case ls -- not terribly interesting) has completed.

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It is possible to have several processes backgrounded at once. When this happens, -you'll need to know which process you want to bring back to the foreground. Just typing -fg will foreground the process that was last backgrounded. What -if you had a whole list of processes in the background? Luckily, bash includes a command -to list all the processes. It's called jobs and gives output -like so:

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-% jobs
-[1]   Stopped                 vim
-[2]-  Stopped                 amp
-[3]+  Stopped                 man ps
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This shows you a list of all the processes that are backgrounded. As you can see, they -are all stopped. This means that the processes are suspended. The number is a sort of ID -for all the backgrounded processes. The ID with a plus sign beside it (man ps) is the process that will be foregrounded if you just type -fg.

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If you wanted to foreground vim, you would type:

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-% fg 1
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and vim would spring back up to the console. Backgrounding -processes can be very useful if you only have one terminal open over a dialup connection. -You can have several programs running on that one terminal, periodically switching back -and forth between them.