Background and foreground processes

You might have noticed that, when you launch a program, it takes over your terminal, preventing you from doing other work in the terminal. This is because most programs run in the foreground when invoked from the shell.

If you have a program that takes a long time to complete, you might want to run that program in the background. To do that, simply append an ampersand (&) to the command. For example, we might want to run the dd command which can take a lot of time. If we run the command as a foreground process we won’t be able to enter any more commands in our terminal window. However, we could run the dd command as a background process:

The dd program now runs in the background. We can use the terminal window to enter other commands.

What if a program is run as a foreground process and you want to use the terminal for something else? Well, you can suspend that program. To stop a running program and put it in the background, press Ctrl+Z. To run that program again in the foreground, type fg:

In the picture above you can see that we’ve started the dd command as a foreground process. We then suspended the program by pressing Ctrl+Z. We can now enter new commands in the terminal windows. To return the dd command to the foreground, we simply typed fg.