Managing jobs

Up until now, everything we have been doing on the shell has been right in front of us, from execution to completion. We’ve installed applications, run programs, and walked through various commands. Each time, we’ve had control of our shell taken from us, and we’ve only been able to start a new task when the previous one had finished. For example, if we were to install the vim-nox package with the apt install command, we would watch helplessly while apt takes care of fetching the package and installing it for us.

While this is going on, our cursor goes away and our shell completes the task for us without allowing us to queue up another command. We can always open a new shell to the server and multitask by having two windows open at once, each doing different tasks. But that’s likely not going to be the most efficient method of multitasking when working with the command line.

Instead, we can actually background a process without waiting...