Shell – How to return a background task to be in the foreground

background-processjobsshell

I would like to know how to stop a running process after appending it with &.

For example, I would like to install software foo. Now, assume, foo has many dependancies, it takes an hour to finish. So, I do: yum install foo &. But I would like to stop that on-going process either by making it foreground (the actual premise of my question) so I can interrupt it, or through other methods if necessary.

Ctrl+C does not seem to stop this.

Best Answer

If the terminal you launched the command from is still open, you can get it back by running fg.

If it is not, identify the process ID by running ps aux | grep yum or just pgrep yum and then use kill PID. Or, if you know you only have one yum instance, run pkill yum.

Related Solutions

Job Control – How to Suspend and Bring a Background Process to Foreground

As Tim said, type fg to bring the last process back to foreground.

If you have more than one process running in the background, do this:

$ jobs
[1]   Stopped                 vim
[2]-  Stopped                 bash
[3]+  Stopped                 vim 23

fg %3 to bring the vim 23 process back to foreground.

To suspend the process running in the background, use:

kill -STOP %job_id

The SIGSTOP signal stops (pauses) a process in essentially the same way Ctrl+Z does.

example: kill -STOP %3.

sources: How to send signals to processes in Linux and Unix and How to manage background and foreground jobs.

Shell – How to send command line apps directly to the background

You can background a task by adding a & after it.

For instance tail -f /var/log/messages & will background the task immediately.

As always you can see what tasks you backgrounded with the jobs command.

This of course assumes you have not yet run the command.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Job Control – How to Suspend and Bring a Background Process to Foreground

Shell – How to send command line apps directly to the background

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