AIX

I started a Java process via SSH that I knew was going to take a long time to run so I backgrounded it and let my SSH session expire. I logged back in to check up on it (it prints its output to stdout, and a summary to a log file when it's finished) and tried to pull it in to the foreground but wasn't able to. The fg man page says this:

Code:

fg <PID>

and I got this error:
I also tried just plain old fg as it was the last process that I sent to the background and I received the same error. The output of ps -ef | grep java confirms that the PID is in fact correct and that the process is still running. What gives?

You can't foreground it to a different terminal than the one it was started in. Run under screen or similar if you need to disconnect and reconnect.

Oye vey. screen isn't installed on this system. Is there any other way to bring it back or will I just have to wait for it to finish?

On a side note: what's the reasoning behind only being able to fg and bg processes in the current terminal? It seems to me that greatly inhibits their usefulness.

Freely moving processes between different terminals has some fundamental problems because the environment that goes with the process might be specific to a particular terminal type. If you restrict yourself to only input terminals of a certain kind (or back in the olden days, that would have been terminals of a single model from a single manufacturer), you might be able to get it working, but then screen already handles that brilliantly.

Agree that the basic design is a bit unattractive, and ideally, you should have something like screen for X clients, too (some remote desktop tools now make that feasible, too).

OK, thanks for the input.