HOWTO: Use Job Control – Putting Processes in the Background

Putting a process or application in the background means that the process essentially detaches itself from the consol, but keeps executing. This frees up the console to do other things.

You can either put a process into the background immediately upon launch, or you can stop a process already running in the foreground and resume it in the background.

To start a process in the background

nano &
[1] 7594

The & sign tells Linux to run nano in the background and reports the job id [1] and the Process ID (PID) [7594].

If I want to get at nano to use it, I can type fg or fg 1.

If I was already running nano and decided later that I wanted to push it to the background, I can use Control-Z to stop nano and then the bg command to resume it in the background.

CTRL-Z
[1]+ Stopped nano
bg