Programming

While trying out my hand at writing an interpreter, I was wondering about a a few issues one of which is the following: When I run a command such as jobs in the shell, I get a list of all the background jobs that are running... But if I need my interpreter to run that command, how would I be doing it? If I'm not mistaken, jobs is an internal command... So what will I specify in path if I want to run it using the execv command?

job control is internal to the shell, not all shells support job control, for example ksh does, sh doesn't.

If you want job control, manage it yourself, as an internal command, internal list of jobs etc.

Oh.. can you tell me where I should start to be able to do that? I mean what should I read to be able to write code for that...

How about you firstly:

1. decide what the requirements for job control are, what is it trying to achieve, how should it behave etc.

2. then decide how to implement.

A shell is said to have job control if it allows users to put process
int the background and vis-a-vis.


Where to start ... these can be done

how to deal with session , process groups and controlling terminal
how to put process in the background.
signals handling

All the best.

Thanks a lot... I've thought of a few things:

1. I need to maintain a table that contains the job id and the job name.
2. I cannot put a process that is running currently through my interpreter into the background, without first invoking the Stop (CTRL+Z) command.
3. Once I invoke the stop command, I can issue a command bg <process_name> to put the task into the background and then the interpreter will issue a signal to the process to resume itself.
4. If I have to bring a process into the foreground, I need to write code in my interpreter in such a way that it first stops the process and then brings it to the foreground and then resumes it (or get it directly?) and then ceases the command of the shell from the user (invoke a wait command until the process is complete?).

I am little confused about jobs and processes - the difference between them. I hope someone can clarify if my above steps seem ok and also the difference between a job and a process...

The steps you want to follow look ok. The difference between jobs and processes is that a job is specific to the shell that you are running. For example, if you run a background job in a shell and check, say, the jobs command, then you get the jobs list starting from job #1. If you start another shell (inside this one), run another background job and run jobs again, you will get a list again starting from job #1.

This is not true of processes. A pid is a pid no matter which shell you look at it from.

So a job is specific to the shell, while a process runs at the system (OS) level.