lsof, fuser, nohup, disown, bg, fg, and jobs

Bit of a cheeky one here – what does anybody want to know about these topics?

There is a book in the pipeline, and I have lots to say about all these things, but am very interested to hear what you think is easy / hard / intuitive / arcane / stupid about these commands and the whole job control side of Unix/Linux and the different shells.

lsof is great, but almost only GNU/Linux; fuser is good, but restricted in how much it actually tells you – you have to go digging into PIDs to see what has to be KILLed or otherwise dealt with.

What, oh faithful few who may still be following this terribly intermittent blog, do you want to see on the subject of processes and job control in the *nix shell?

2 Responses to lsof, fuser, nohup, disown, bg, fg, and jobs

  1. Colin Hines says:

    I’d like to see more on this topic — I stumbled across your website recently after joining #bash. Saw the book, hopefully it will be mentioned in that or the pdf. I have used both lsof and fuser in the past but only on very specific tasks. I prefer lsof probably because I’ve used it more being that most of the machines I manage are linux, but I would like to understand more about fuser as well and how it can help me tracking processes…

  2. unixshell says:

    Quite a lot of this is covered in my book (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1118024486/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=steveparkeror-20) – particularly Chapter 10. There is a great deal of depth behind these commands, and the concepts behind them, which is not particularly well covered by any documentation that I am aware of.

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