A nice trick to run multiple jobs.

[Big-E]

So, Linux never ceases to amaze me as there are new things I learn every day. You may have already known about the following, but its something new I just discovered (previous I would have used the screen utility). But now, I know how I can run multiple jobs in a single terminal window.

Say you have a long job you need to run, maybe you are compiling some source code and to do so, you run:

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make install 

instead you can run:

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make install &

Now, when you run the command with the ampersand it will set the process as a background [bg] process which you can then bring back at a later point to the foreground using the foreground [fg] command. If you have multiple jobs running as background processes you can run jobs -l to see what number is assigned to what process and then run fg # to bring up that specific process.

The simplicity is so useful.

[bad_brain]

btw, you can bring a background process back into foreground again with:

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fg

if you have more than one background process you can bring the 2nd one into the foreground by:

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%2

to check what background processes are running you can use the jobs command...

[lilrofl]

well that's down right helpful.