Ask Dave Taylor: Tech and Business

Sunday

My Unix background jobs have become invisible?

Last night i started downloading all of Fedora core via rsync. It was getting late, so I put it in the background and logged out. i just logged in this morning, and wanted to see where it was at, so I typed "jobs", but surprise, it isn't there. I know it's still running, because the lights on my hub are still blinking, it shows up in "top", and i can see (du -bs fedora/) that the folder is still growing. How do i get the output back on my terminal?

First, the bad news. Once you've disassociated a running application from an input or output device, you can't get it back. Hopefully it's all working without a glitch so that's not a big problem.

Now, let me explain what happened with your Linux process and show you how to avoid this problem in the future.

When you log in to your computer, your shell creates three I/O channels that are then used by all running applications spawned by (that is, launched from within) the shell unless specified otherwise. They are...