Foreground and Background Processes Management

To illustrate, here’s a directory listing:

user@example:~/scripts/trunk/backup_scripts# ls -l  
total 76  
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user   894 2011-06-27 10:00 backup.hwaddr.sh  
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 12175 2011-05-02 22:54 backup.local.sh  
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user  6194 2011-04-12 16:53 backup.mysql.sh  
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 14638 2011-04-28 11:29 backup.network.sh  
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user  3201 2011-05-02 09:06 backup.opendirectory.sh  
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user  7871 2011-04-28 11:32 backup.rotate.sh  
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user  3743 2011-04-12 16:53 backup.rpms.sh  
-rwx------ 1 user user  5037 2011-06-28 15:03 backup.sh  
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user  4184 2011-06-27 10:01 backup.staging.sh  
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user  3128 2011-06-27 10:58 backup.subversion.sh

Let’s say I started editing a file (e.g. vim backup.sh. I now hit
Ctrl+z to ‘push’ the process into the background. This is what I see:

[1]+  Stopped                 vim backup.sh  
user@support:~/scripts/trunk/backup_scripts#

Now I edit another file (or start another process) and hit Ctrl+z
again:

[2]+  Stopped                 vim backup.subversion.sh  
user@support:~/scripts/trunk/backup_scripts#

And so on. To list all my background jobs, I can either issue ps
or (better) jobs:

user@support:~/scripts/trunk/backup_scripts# ps  
  PID TTY          TIME CMD  
 3561 pts/0    00:00:00 bash  
 3697 pts/0    00:00:00 vim  
 3728 pts/0    00:00:00 vim  
 3773 pts/0    00:00:00 vim  
 3790 pts/0    00:00:00 top  
 3797 pts/0    00:00:00 ps

user@support:~/scripts/trunk/backup_scripts# jobs  
[1]   Stopped                 vim backup.sh  
[2]+  Stopped                 vim backup.subversion.sh  
[3]   Stopped                 vim backup.network.sh  
[4]-  Stopped                 top

The “+” and “-” signs indicate the first and second most recent jobs
respectively. Typing fg will bring the job tagged with a “+” into the
foreground. From the output above, let’s say you wanted to bring top
into the foreground instead:

user@support:~/scripts/trunk/backup_scripts# fg 4

To keep top running in the background for example (“amping off”), you
would just type bg 4

References