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Managing Processes

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There are many things we can do to manage processes in the shell:

  • Run more than one program by placing it in the background
  • Query running processes
  • Interrupt or re-attach to background processes
  • Wait nicely for background processes to finish

To run programs in the background, add a single trailing ampersand (&) to the command.

$ sleep 600 &
[1] 1298141

$ echo "I still have control of my shell!"
I still have control of my shell!
Output from these "background-ed" programs is still streamed to the shell. But you can still interact with the shell while the background processes are going.

After the program is put in the background, the shell tells you two numbers.

  • The relative job ID,(relative to the number of child processes)

  • The system process ID (PID).

You can check on your shell's child processes with the jobs program. 

$ jobs
[1]+  Running      sleep 600 &
You can also check on ALL running processes with the ps command. 
$ ps -u username
PID     TTY     TIME   CMD
221965 ?      00:00:00 systemd
221967 ?      00:00:00 (sd-pam)
221972 ?      00:00:00 sshd
221973 pts/10 00:00:00 bash
222170 pts/10 00:00:00 sleep
222182 pts/10 00:00:00 ps

Waiting

If you want your shell (or script) to wait for all background processes to finish before continuing:

$ wait

After using the wait command, you'll notice that you no longer have control of your shell. That's because it's waiting for all backrounded processes to finish before completing.

Re-Attaching

You can also re-attach to background processes with the fg program. This code will bring the sleep 600 program back to the foreground and will wait for it to finish before giving you back control of the command line.

$ sleep 600 &
[1] 1240872
$ fg
sleep 600

You can also use ctrl+z to pause a job actively running in the shell, and then bg to resume it in the background:

$ sleep 600
[ctrl+z]
[1]+  Stopped                 sleep 600
$ bg
[1]+ sleep 600 &
$ jobs
[1]+  Running                 sleep 600 &

Interrupting Processes

Lastly, you can interrupt processes with the kill command (using % for the relative PID).

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2
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$ sleep 600 &
[1] 222728

$ kill -s int %1

The kill program can technically send any signal to a program (despite its ominous name). In the example above, we have sent the interrupt (int) signal to the first child process. This interrupts the process and tries to stop it.

Program reference

Program Action
ps List all running processes
jobs List running background child processes
kill Send a signal to a processes (usually to stop)
wait Wait for running background child processes to complete
fg Reattach to background process

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