Re: [feature request] put job in background without stopping it first

[Dan Jacobson]

Young Dan has an important job that he forgot to put into the
background.  Now he wants to do something else and needs to do "C-z bg"
to get to a prompt.  However fast he does those keystrokes, he will
still cause a notable momentary delay in the process pumping the disco music
onto the dance floor.  As this is the space shuttle, he is not running
a windowing system nor screen manager.  He has only this window...

>>>>> "P" == Paul Jarc <prj@po.cwru.edu> writes:

P> Dan Jacobson <jidanni@deadspam.com> wrote:
>> Wasn't there a ^Y in some shell somewhere that could do the
>> same as a "^Z;bg".

P> That doesn't seem likely.  It would take a lot of work to do this in
P> bash.  The effect you want is to change the terminal's foreground
P> process group, and to notify bash that it has received control of the
P> terminal.  About the only way to do that would be to send *all* input
P> for *all* jobs through bash and let bash relay all input to the
P> appropriate job, except for this magic keystroke.  Otherwise, the
P> keystoke would be delivered to the terminal driver, and terminal
P> drivers don't have any way of doing what you want.

>> if I forget to use "&" at outset, how can I get the job into the
>> background with out C-z or going thru some back window or something.
>> Assume I only have one window on one terminal.

P> echo "exec screen" >> ~/.bash_profile

Yes, we all have windows up the kazoo these days, but OK, anyway,
let's just pretend that not only did you forget to use "&", you forgot
to start "screen" or "x-windows"... so I guess you're stuck until the
backups are thru being burned onto the CD or the Fax is all sent
etc. etc. things you don't want to interrupt.
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