Julia EvansJul 2, 2024

poll: when you're using your shell **interactively**, do you ever use its job control features (ctrl+z, fg, bg, `jobs`, `wait`, etc?)

(other than maybe occasionally backgrounding a process with &)

yes, frequently
23.1%
yes, occasionally
36.8%
never (or almost never)
39%
other
1%
Poll ended at .
Show threadJulia EvansJul 2, 2024

I'm also curious about reasons folks are using job control instead of opening a new tab in their terminal/tmux/screen

so far we have:

* use ctrl+z to suspend a CPU-hungry program because you need to use the CPU for something else
* you're in a situation with no screen/tmux/fancy terminal
* background a GUI app so it's not taking up a terminal tab
* accidentally started a long-running job without tmux/screen
* already set up a lot of environment variables
* accidentally ran ctrl+z

(2/?)

Show threadIves
@b0rk Because I'm frequently using remote machines via ssh. Opening a new window and ssh'ing again into that machine is a lot more faff then using ctrl-z + bg.
Jul 2, 2024 at 12:30pmWeb
Show threadJulia EvansJul 2, 2024
@ives thanks! do you prefer using ctrl+z/bg/etc to something like screen/tmux?
Show threadIvesJul 2, 2024
@b0rk screen/tmux are nice tools, but you need to start those beforehand. ctrl-z/bg is nice when you started a cmd and it's taking longer than expected.