8.8 Job Control

Job control lets you place foreground jobs in the background, bring background jobs to the foreground, or suspend (temporarily stop) running jobs. The shell provides the following commands for job control. For more information on these commands, see Section 8.9.

bg

Put a job in the background.

fg

Put a job in the foreground.

jobs

List active jobs.

kill

Terminate a job.

notify

Notify when a background job finishes.

stop

Suspend a background job.

Ctrl-Z

Suspend the foreground job.

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 preceding).

%+

Current job (same as preceding).

%-

Previous job.