Thursday, April 16, 2009

You Learn Something New Every Day

I think I must have been off school the day we did the beginner's Unix class. I noticed some weirdness in my apache error logs today, even weirder, the user was apparently using my own external IP address. After a bit of investigation I noticed that w3m was running on my server, on pts/5, which according to who I was on using bash. I first had to look up tty and pts. Ok, got that. Now switch screens and find pts/5, but w3m doesn't seem to be running. A helpful colleague asked if I'd tried fg, which I'd never even heard of. Turns out you can send processes to the background using ctrl-z* and bring them back with fg, would you believe it? Guess that's how people survive without screen.

* I had wondered sometimes what happened to processes went when I hit ctrl-z accidentally, doh.

6 comments:

  1. `bg` shows your backgrounded processes also.

    I thought at first it was going to be something I'd run on your server a long time ago and forgot about. Often find that I've left a screen session running with a logged in root prompt. oops!

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  2. ok just realised thats bollocks - it's `jobs` that shows backgrounded processes. `bg` starts backgrounded processes to actually run in the background, ctrl+z actually freezes the process and fg brings it back, but bg will start it running in the background....

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  3. Well bg seems to list background processes on my box. Unfortunately I don't seem to have a manual entry for it.

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  4. maybe thats why I was confused. whatis for the 2 commands on gentoo:

    jobs (1p) - display status of jobs in the current session

    bg (1p) - run jobs in the background

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  5. hey have you seen this?

    http://portableubuntu.demonccc.com.ar/

    runs ubuntu within windows, it's actually pretty good too.

    ReplyDelete