foreground (man fg ?)

Question

Level 1

65 points

foreground (man fg ?)

Running Terminal, I put a process into the background using ctrl-z and then bg.

How do I bring the process back to the foreground?

I used ps to find the PID (1234), and then entered the following:
$ fg 1234
-bash: fg: 1234: no such job

Help?

Thanks.

G5 PowerMac Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Jan 3, 2006 10:42 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Jan 3, 2006 11:37 PM in response to Aaaaaack!

'fg' works on shell jobs IDs (not Unix PIDs). These values are local to a given shell process, meaning you can only fg a process in the shell that bg'ed it. The command 'jobs' will list the jobs running in a shell.

Reply

Answer 2

Aaaaaack! Author

Level 1

65 points

Jan 3, 2006 11:40 PM in response to Daniel Macks

Ah, that makes sense. Is there a command that I can use to bring back to the foreground jobs not local to a given shell?

Thanks.

Reply

Answer 3

Jan 3, 2006 11:53 PM in response to Aaaaaack!

Not really. Consider that processes are a tree, where each spawned process is a branch off the process that spawned it. You're asking "how to I transfer a branch to a different part of the tree?", which isn't how things work.

Reply

Answer 4

Jan 4, 2006 9:15 PM in response to Aaaaaack!

Can I ask why you want to do this?

If it's that you want to be able to put things in the background, close Terminal, and get those things back later, there are other ways (e.g. screen) to do that...

Reply