UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Is there a way to suspend (TSTP?) a job that is running in the background, _without_ first bringing it to the foreground and inputting Ctrl-Z from the keyboard?

IOW, something similar to issuing the shell's bg builtin command on a job ID to resume a job that is suspended in the background, except here we want to _suspend_ a job that is already running in the background.

Cheers

I don't know of a shell builtin for that, but you can suspend it with kill -STOP pid and resume it with kill -CONT pid

Thanks.

This works great. But the new status is not immediately reflected in the jobs -l output.

Can I get the status to update with another signal?

Certain events seem to trigger an update in the status, e.g., bg'ing another job, or a pipe.

Considering a pipe triggers the status update, this is the lame hack I came up with show the updated status immediately:

Code:

lamehack(){ kill -18 %$1; :|: ;}