Certain of the following job control commands take a job identifier as an argument. See the table at end of the chapter.
Lists the jobs running in the background, giving the job number. Not as useful as ps.
It is all too easy to confuse jobs and processes. Certain builtins, such as kill, disown, and wait accept either a job number or a process number as an argument. The fg, bg and jobs commands accept only a job number.
bash$
sleep 100 &
[1] 1384
bash $
jobs
[1]+ Running sleep 100 &
“1” is the job number (jobs are maintained by the current shell). “1384” is the PID or process ID number (processes are maintained by the system). To kill this job/process, either a kill %1 or a kill 1384 works.
Thanks, S.C.
Remove job(s) from the shell's table of active jobs.
The fg command switches a job running in the background into the foreground. The bg command restarts a suspended job, and runs it in the background. If no job number is specified, then the fg or bg command acts upon the currently running job.
Suspend script execution until all jobs running in background have terminated, or until the job number or process ID specified as an option terminates. Returns the exit status of waited-for command.
You may use the wait command to prevent a script from exiting before a background job finishes executing (this would create a dreaded orphan process).
Example 15.26. Waiting for a process to finish before proceeding
#!/bin/bash ROOT_UID=0 # Only users with $UID 0 have root privileges. E_NOTROOT=65 E_NOPARAMS=66 if [ "$UID" -ne "$ROOT_UID" ] then echo "Must be root to run this script." # "Run along kid, it's past your bedtime." exit $E_NOTROOT fi if [ -z "$1" ] then echo "Usage: `basename $0` find-string" exit $E_NOPARAMS fi echo "Updating 'locate' database..." echo "This may take a while." updatedb /usr & # Must be run as root. wait # Don't run the rest of the script until 'updatedb' finished. # You want the database updated before looking up the file name. locate $1 # Without the 'wait' command, in the worse case scenario, #+ the script would exit while 'updatedb' was still running, #+ leaving it as an orphan process. exit 0
Optionally, wait can take a job
identifier as an argument, for example,
wait%1
or wait
$PPID
.
[67]
See the job id table.
Within a script, running a command in the background
with an ampersand (&) may cause the script
to hang until ENTER is hit. This
seems to occur with commands that write to
stdout
. It can be a major annoyance.
#!/bin/bash # test.sh ls -l & echo "Done."
bash$
./test.sh
Done. [bozo@localhost test-scripts]$ total 1 -rwxr-xr-x 1 bozo bozo 34 Oct 11 15:09 test.sh _
As Walter Brameld IV explains it:
As far as I can tell, such scripts don't actually hang. It just
seems that they do because the background command writes text to
the console after the prompt. The user gets the impression that
the prompt was never displayed. Here's the sequence of events:
1. Script launches background command.
2. Script exits.
3. Shell displays the prompt.
4. Background command continues running and writing text to the
console.
5. Background command finishes.
6. User doesn't see a prompt at the bottom of the output, thinks script
is hanging.
Placing a wait after the background command seems to remedy this.
#!/bin/bash # test.sh ls -l & echo "Done." wait
bash$
./test.sh
Done. [bozo@localhost test-scripts]$ total 1 -rwxr-xr-x 1 bozo bozo 34 Oct 11 15:09 test.sh
Redirecting the
output of the command to a file or even to
/dev/null
also takes care of this
problem.
This has a similar effect to Control+Z, but it suspends the shell (the shell's parent process should resume it at an appropriate time).
Exit a login shell, optionally specifying an exit status.
Gives statistics on the system time elapsed when executing commands, in the following form:
0m0.020s 0m0.020s
This capability is of relatively limited value, since it is not common to profile and benchmark shell scripts.
Forcibly terminate a process by sending it an appropriate terminate signal (see Example 17.6, “pidof helps kill a process”).
Example 15.27. A script that kills itself
#!/bin/bash # self-destruct.sh kill $$ # Script kills its own process here. # Recall that "$$" is the script's PID. echo "This line will not echo." # Instead, the shell sends a "Terminated" message to stdout. exit 0 # Normal exit? No! # After this script terminates prematurely, #+ what exit status does it return? # # sh self-destruct.sh # echo $? # 143 # # 143 = 128 + 15 # TERM signal
kill -l
lists all the
signals (as does the
file /usr/include/asm/signal.h
).
A kill -9
is a sure
kill, which will usually terminate a
process that stubbornly refuses to die with a plain
kill. Sometimes, a kill
-15
works. A zombie process,
that is, a child process that has terminated, but that
the parent process
has not (yet) killed, cannot be killed by a logged-on
user -- you can't kill something that is already dead --
but init will generally clean it up
sooner or later.
The killall command kills a running process by name, rather than by process ID. If there are multiple instances of a particular command running, then doing a killall on that command will terminate them all.
This refers to the killall
command in /usr/bin
,
not the killall script in /etc/rc.d/init.d
.
The command directive disables aliases and functions for the command immediately following it.
bash$
command ls
Invoking builtin
BUILTIN_COMMAND runs the command
BUILTIN_COMMAND
as a shell builtin, temporarily disabling
both functions and external system commands with the
same name.
This either enables or disables a shell
builtin command. As an example, enable -n
kill
disables the shell builtin kill, so that when Bash
subsequently encounters kill, it invokes
the external command /bin/kill
.
The -a
option to enable lists all the
shell builtins, indicating whether or not they
are enabled. The -f filename
option lets enable load a builtin as a shared library
(DLL) module from a properly compiled object file.
[68].
This is a port to Bash of the ksh autoloader. With autoload in place, a function with an autoload declaration will load from an external file at its first invocation. [69] This saves system resources.
Note that autoload is not a part of the
core Bash installation. It needs to be loaded in with
enable -f
(see above).
Table 15.1. Job identifiers
Notation | Meaning |
---|---|
%N | Job number [N] |
%S | Invocation (command-line) of job begins with string S |
%?S | Invocation (command-line) of job contains within it string S |
%% | “current” job (last job stopped in foreground or started in background) |
%+ | “current” job (last job stopped in foreground or started in background) |
%- | Last job |
$! | Last background process |
[67] This only applies to child processes, of course.
[68] The C source for a number of loadable builtins is
typically found in the /usr/share/doc/bash-?.??/functions
directory.
Note that the -f
option to
enable is not portable to all
systems.
[69] The same effect as autoload can be achieved with typeset -fu.