Re: Windowmaker Question

[Nathaniel Reindl <fiction@sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 11:16:10PM -0500, Harold Crouch wrote:
> Backgrounded !?!?!?  I think that I'm about to learn something here,
> and I bet it has something to do with that ampersand.  Keep talking;
> I'm listening.

As opposed to foregrounded, yes.  And your suspicion is correct about
the ampersand.

What you're effectively doing is taking advantage of the capability to
have multiple jobs running in one shell by means of backgrounded
processes.

Say that you're reading your mail in mutt, but you're too lazy to open
up another shell so that you can tweak your .fetchmailrc to remove a few
lines that define mail accounts you just closed somewhere.  To keep mutt
running, you'd hit C-z (^Z or Control+Z for you non-Emacs folk) to shove
it into the background, and as appropriate, you'll get dumped back to
the shell.

    cloudleaper:~$ jobs
    [1]+  Stopped                 mutt
    cloudleaper:~$

When you're done editing your .fetchmailrc, you can get back to mutt
just as easily as you ran away from it.

    cloudleaper:~$ fg
    [ mutt resumes ]

This same concept applies to X programs that you forget to background so
that they don't take over your xterms. :)  This time, instead of issuing
"fg" at the shell, you'll use "bg" to work your magic.

    cloudleaper:~$ xfontsel

    [1]+  Stopped                 xfontsel
    cloudleaper:~$ bg
    [1]+ xfontsel &
    cloudleaper:~$

-- 
Nathaniel Reindl, freelance tech support monkey and college student
Fedora Core 4 kernel 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 on an AMD Opteron 240

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