[Chapter 4] 4.7 Job Control
Author: Daniel Gilly & the Staff of O'Reilly & Associates
Date: 1998-08-06T21:59:04Z

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| Chapter 4 The Bourne Shell and Korn Shell |

## 4.7 Job Control

Job control lets you place foreground jobs in the background, bring background jobs to the foreground, or suspend (temporarily stop) running jobs. Job control is enabled by any of the following commands:

>     jsh -i	Bourne shell
>     ksh -m -i	Korn shell (same as next two)
>     set -m
>     set -o monitor

Many job control commands take `jobID` as an argument. This argument can be specified as follows:

%n

  Job number `n`.

%s

  Job whose command line starts with string `s`.

%?s

  Job whose command line contains string `s`.

%%

  Current job.

%+

  Current job (same as above).

%-

  Previous job.

The Bourne and Korn shells provide the following job control commands. For more information on these commands, see "Built-in Commands" earlier in this section.

bg

  Put a job in the background.

fg

  Put a job in the foreground.

jobs

  List active jobs.

kill

  Terminate a job.

stop

  Suspend a background job.

stty tostop

  Stop background jobs if they try to send output to the terminal.

suspend

  Same as CTRL-Z.

wait

  Wait for background jobs to finish.

CTRL-Z

  Suspend a foreground job. Then use bg or fg. (Your terminal may use something other than CTRL-Z as the suspend character.)

4.6 Built-in Commands (Bourne and Korn Shell) |  | 4.8 Invoking the Shell