Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 12:43:32 -0800 (PST) From: Derrick Baumer <bduk@earthlink.net> To: suckworldcreator@hotmail.com Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: using & commands Message-ID: <200003302043.MAA00360@earthlink.net> In-Reply-To: <20000330195324.59712.qmail@hotmail.com> (suckworldcreator@hotmail.com)
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> From: "Sarah Li" <suckworldcreator@hotmail.com>
>
> To whom it may concern:
>
> I am currently doing a project on Free BSD and I have a few
> questions. The first one is what is the & along with a command used
> for?
It runs the program in the background...
> and what does it mean by putting it into the background?
...which means it starts running, but it frees your terminal up to do
other things. For example, if I want to send mail mail out, I would
type 'sendmail -q', then wait for 30 seconds or so while it did its
job, then it'd finish and I'd have my prompt back so I could continue
working. (Run-on sentence from hell there, eh?)
Instead, I can type 'sendmail -q &' and it will immediately give my
control back to do other things while it runs in the background.
> also, how would you stop a background task that has gone beserk?
Then, if I suddenly decided I wanted to stop sendmail from finishing
its job, I would type 'fg'. That will bring the program back to the
foreground so I could stop it.
If you have multiple jobs in the background, typing 'fg' will just
bring the last one up. To bring a specific one up, you need to type
'fc -l', which will list all of the background processes you have
running. The first column is the background job number. If I wanted
to bring job 3 up, I would type 'fg 3'.
Hope that helped.
--
Derrick Baumer - Black Duck Software
<bduk@earthlink.net>
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