How can I resume a stopped job in Linux?

Question

How can I resume a stopped job in Linux? I was using emacs and accidentally hit ctrl-z which blasted me back to the console. I can see it when I type 'jobs'

[*****]$ jobs
[1]+  Stopped                 emacs test_queue.cpp

Answer 1

The command fg is what you want to use. You can also give it a job number if there are more than one stopped jobs.

Answer 2

The general job control commands in Linux are:

• jobs - list the current jobs
• fg - resume the job that's next in the queue
• fg %[number] - resume job [number]
• bg - Push the next job in the queue into the background
• bg %[number] - Push the job [number] into the background
• kill %[number] - Kill the job numbered [number]
• kill -[signal] %[number] - Send the signal [signal] to job number [number]
• disown %[number] - disown the process(no more terminal will be owner), so command will be alive even after closing the terminal.

That's pretty much all of them. Note the % infront of the job number in the commands - this is what tells kill you're talking about jobs and not processes.

Answer 3

You can also type %<process_name>; i.e., you hit Ctrl-Z in emacs, then you can type %emacs in the console and bring it back to the foreground.

Answer 4

Just to add to the other answers, bash lets you skip the fg if you specify a job number.

For example, these are equivalent and resume the latest job:

%
%%
fg
fg %

These resume job #4:

%4
fg 4

Answer 5

If you didn't launch it from current terminal, use ps aux | grep <process name> to find the process number (pid), then resume it with:

kill -SIGCONT <pid>

(Despite the name, kill is simply a tool to send a signal to the process, allowing processes to communicate with each other. A "kill signal" is only one of many standard signals.)

Bonus tip: wrap the first character of the process name with [] to prevent the grep command itself appearing in the results. e.g. to find emacs process, use ps aux | grep [e]macs

Answer 6

For anybody who wants to continue all suspended processes.

I don't know how but I achieved several times to completely lock my screen. When I check the processes there are dozens that are suspended. So I continued all processes to unlock my screen.

Switch to text console with Ctrl-Alt-F3 or similar. Log in, then issue:

ps ax|grep " T"| awk '{print $1}' |grep -v PID | xargs echo kill -SIGCONT

• ps lists all processes
• grep finds mostly only suspended processes (dirty hack, improve?)
• awk fetches only first column, PID
• grep removes header "PID"
• xargs executes a command on the input given
• echo shows command instead of executing
• kill -SIGCONT sends signal to continue the process

Output is something like this:

kill -SIGCONT 214191 334813

Either remove echo, cut & paste or pipe the output through bash to actually execute it.