On Mon, Mar 06, 2000 at 09:48:49PM -0700, Mark Peoples wrote:
> You mean like put the app into background, but still have it usable?
>
> try, eg: netscape &
>
> Stick an & on the end
Right. And that's a shell feature, has nothing to do with X; so you can
also do it with textual apps or apps that don't produce any output.
In addition, there are several other useful job control commands. With
most apps, including X apps, if you forget the "&" initially, you can
hit control-z while the xterm has the input focus; that will suspend the
application (it's still in memory but not allowed to have any CPU cycles).
Then type "bg" to have it run in the background; the effect is the same
as if you'd initially used the & at the end of the command line. "fg" brings
the most recently suspended app back to the foreground. If several apps
have been started and then suspended or backgrounded, you will see them
when you type the command "jobs":
[electron:~][9:57:28pm] jobs
[1] - Suspended mutt
[2] + Suspended less version.txt
and you can restore any job back to the foreground by typing %x where x
is the number shown in brackets. So in the example if I type %1, mutt will
come back into the foreground. This is how it was possible in the old
days to multitask when all you have is a dumb terminal (still very useful
now when you telnet into a remote unix system).
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