I learned something new from my brother the other day about unix job processing. We had written a script to do some specific analysis of the logs for dealazon.com, and it would take about 30 seconds to a minute for the script to complete.

I had known for quite some time that you can run a script in the background by appending an & to the end of your command, for instance:

$> ./some_slow_script.pl &

I often run scripts that take a while, but forget to append the & so they run in the background. Well it turns out you can hit Ctrl+Z this will pause the process that is currently running, and give you a shell. Now you can type bg to send that process into the background. Now you can use the jobs command to see how its doing, or the fg command to send it back into the foreground.

So for example you might do something like this:

$> ./some_slow_script.pl
hits Ctrl+Z
[1]+  Stopped   ./some_slow_script.pl
$>
$> bg
[1]+ ./some_slow_script.pl &
$> jobs
[1]+  Running   ./some_slow_script.pl &
$> jobs
[1]+  Done   ./some_slow_script.pl