Putting a currently running process in the background

Sometimes a process seems like hanging, the terminal is irresponsive, you know it is running, but somehow you need to logout and need the process to continue running in the background.

This calls for a "kill" command with SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals.

1. First, find the pid of the process

$ ps -ef | grep myprocess

1234

2. Once you have the pid, issue a kill with SIGSTOP signal to stop the process, assuming the process id is 1234.

$ sudo kill -SIGSTOP 1234

3. Issue a kill with SIGCONT to continue the process back in the background

$ sudo kill -SIGCONT 1234

4. You can check the backgrounded process using jobs command

$ jobs -l

[1]+ 1234 Stopped (signal)        myprocess

5. To get the process back to the foreground, just use fg command. %1 referring to the jobs number when you use the jobs command.

$ fg %1

You can refer to kill and signal man pages for more information.