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The following example shows how to suspend a job, run it in the background, check its status, and do something else while waiting for UNIX to say the job running in the background is finished.
rigel% cc -o myprogram myprogram.c ctrl-Z Stopped rigel% bg [1] cc -o myprogram myprogram.c rigel% jobs [1] + Running cc -o myprogram myprogram.c rigel% lpq no entries [1] + Done quad cc -o myprogram myprogram.c rigel% ls -F myprogam* myprogram.c test-data
In this example, a user uses the cc command to compile a C program
that's in a file named `myprogram.c'. The user decides that the compile
job is taking too long and that she wants to have the terminal back
while the job completes, so she types ctrl-Z to suspend the job.
Because she wants the job to continue in the background, she types the
bg command. She then types the jobs command to make sure the job is
running. Then she does other work while the job continues running in
the background, and UNIX notifies her when her job has finished
running.
If compiling this program always takes a long time, it would make sense for the user to run it as a background job in the first place. The following example shows how to do this and then check to see that the job is running.
rigel% cc -o myprogram myprogram.c & [1] 1962 rigel% jobs [1] + Running cc -o myprogram myprogram.c
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