jobs: Display status of background jobs

Package: language

Usage

jobs

Parameters

None.

Description

Jobs is used to display the status of background jobs. If no job number is specified then all the status of all background jobs is displayed. For each job there is one line of output, e.g.

[2] 0:14 +Running copy file1 file2 &

Here 2 is the job number of the job; 0:14 is the clock time in minutes and seconds since the job was submitted; `Running' indicates that the task is currently running while the `+' indicates that this was the last background job started. The remainder of the line is a copy of the actual command used to start the job.

The possible states for a background job are:

Done    -- the job has finished normally
Exit N  -- the job terminated with exit code N
Stopped -- the job is waiting for input from the user
                (see the service command)
Running -- the job is currently executing

Examples

cl> jobs
    [1]  21:13  Done      mkhelp >& dev$null &
    [2]   0:05 +Running   count *.hlp > _junk &

Bugs

Exit codes are rarely displayed when jobs terminate abnormally. The CL checks for background job termination only when a command is entered, hence the elapsed time shown will often be greater than it should be.