Sharing Linux: Linux Bash Shell Tutorial: How to manage background and foreground jobs in Linux terminal.

In this post, I'm going to share on how to manage background and foreground jobs in Linux terminal. Before I go into details, lets look at some jobs basic terminology .

Jobs are processes that running in a particular shell .Many jobs can run in the shell at once.Only one job can be active in the terminal at once .However many jobs can be executed in the background which known as Background Job.The active job in the current terminal is call Foreground Job .

Tutorial Content List

Running jobs in background .
Listing Jobs: Listing your jobs.
Suspending Jobs: Suspending a job to do something else.
Background Jobs: Having jobs work in the background.
Foreground Jobs: Putting jobs in the foreground.
Terminating Jobs: Stopping jobs before they're finished.

1)Running jobs in the background .

To run command in the background run

Running jobs in the background

Once you run the job in the background, the terminal will assign a job id and a process number respectively. job id is the number in the bracket[] followed with process number

2)Listing Jobs.

run "jobs" command to check the jobs status.

jobs status

NOTE: the plus(+) sign shows which is the latest job executed in the terminal and the minus(-) sign shows the second latest job that was executed in the terminal.you can access the specific job by referring the job id .

3)Suspending Jobs.

To suspend active job in the terminal, press "CTRL-Z"

CTRL-Z

Once suspended, the job status will show as "stopped" . Now you you can choose to run the job either in the foreground or in terminal background.

4)Background Jobs .

To put the recent executed job in the background, run "bg" command. This command will put the last executed job in the background (in other words the job with the plus(+) sign .

Background jobs

If you want to run specific job id in the background, use "bg" command followed with "%" and the job id number .

Running job id 1 in the background

5)Foreground Jobs.

To put the recent executed job in the foreground, run "fg" command. This command will put the last executed job in foreground (in other words the job with the plus(+) sign .

Foreground jobs

On executing the command, job with id 3 is shown in the terminal as it was the latest job executed in the terminal.

to put a specific job id on the terminal, use "fg" command followed with "%" and the job id .