In this hour, you learn
About job control in the shell: stopping jobs
How to put jobs in background and bring them back to the foreground
How to find out what tasks are running by using jobs and ps
How to terminate errant processes by using kill
Throughout this book, I've indicated that my focus is on the most important and valuable flags and options for the commands covered. That's all well and good, but how do you find out about the alternatives that might actually work better for your use?
This hour presents an explanation of a UNIX philosophical puzzle: What is a running program? To learn the answer, you are introduced to ps and jobs, for controlling processes; fg and bg, to move your own processes back and forth between the foreground and background; and the quasi-omnipotent kill command, for stopping programs in their proverbial tracks.