re: job prob

[Dave Mielke <dave mielke cc>]

[quoted lines by Brian Tew on March 19, 2002, at 04:55]

>if i start a job with the ampersand at the end, it is backgrounded.
>but if i then fg that job, i cannot suspend it.

I think I know what's going on. If I'm not mistaken, you're the same guy who's
also using the VBii+, and starting bash from rc.local. If I'm remembering
correctly, you're invoking bash via su with "&>/dev/ttyS0" in order to redirect
all output to the VersaBraille. Therein may lie your problem. Speaking to what
old software does (I believe you also said you're using RedHat 5.2) is always
difficult, but here's a possibility.

Bash only automatically turns on its interactive mode if both its standard
input and standard output are connected to a tty. Strictly speaking, standard
output, being connected to /dev/ttyS0, is connected to a tty. The fact that
it's not the foreground tty, however, may be what's causing your problem. Bash
may not think it should start up in interactive mode. You can tell if it's in
interactive mode by looking at the content of the special environment variable
"$-" (dollar minus). If it doesn't contain the ltter "i", then bash isn't in
interactive mode.

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