Have you ever had a resource-strapped server late on a Friday afternoon, just as all IT support has gone home for the weekend? Your usual X Window System access is acting up, and you must resort to a basic Telnet connection to see what's going on, before you resort to on-call support. In such a critical situation, you might consider that job control could be of assistance.

Job control is that old Linux friend you haven't spoken to in years, but you can pick up the friendship where you left off as if no time has passed. I was recently reintroduced to job control while typing on a new keyboard with an unfamiliar layout. I attempted to save and exit from a vi session with my go-to command for exiting vi (Shift+zz). However, I hit the "terminal stop" signal (SIGTSTP), otherwise known as the suspend character (Ctrl+z), and the session disappeared. I had to think for a second about what happened. Thankfully, I realized what I had done.

I found myself mistakenly saying to myself that the process had gone into the background, but this is of course not true. What had actually happened was that the process group was suspended and was inserted into the job queue, a utility that was invaluable in a time when users only had a single terminal with a single command line.

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