Calling a program to foreground

[C. Linus Hicks]

On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 23:18, Parameshwara Bhat wrote:
> Hello List,
> 
> I need a quick help with two things,
> 
> 1. I have invoked wget to recursively download a web directory in the 
> background. I would like to see from time time what & how it is doing.
> Is it possible to call it to foreground,check and resend it to 
> background again ?

You don't say what shell you are using; there are some differences. I
will assume you are using bash. You can read about this in the "JOB
CONTROL" section of the bash man page.

For the shell where you invoked the background process, use the command
'fg' to continue it in the foreground. If you used the --background
option to wget, its output will go either to the output file you
specified or the default, in which case bringing it to the foreground
will show you nothing. You could do a 'tail -f <fn>' to see what it is
currently doing.

If you didn't specify an option to either make it quiet or re-direct its
output, using either control-Z or an '&' to background a job will cause
it to suspend the next time it tries to write to stdout or stderr. Read
the section on "JOB CONTROL" in the bash man page.

If you expect your wget job to display its output on stdout when it is
in the foreground, and to continue running discarding its output when it
is in the background, you will find that is not the case.

-- 
C. Linus Hicks <lhicks at nc.rr.com>