The Linux Daily

Example Usage of ‘jobs’ Command

This is one of those commands that hit me as “Whoa! How did I miss that?” — the jobs command. It simply lists the jobs currently running on the system. Unlike ps, it only lists what’s running in the foreground and the background. So, say you stop a process with ctrl+z and you want to later kill it, you can use the jobs command to quickly find it and then kill it off. For example:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null
^Z
[1]+  Stopped                 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null
# jobs
[1]+  Stopped                 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null
# kill %1
# jobs
[1]+  Terminated              dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null
# jobs
#

You can easily kill off more than one process as well by simply including the %number after kill like:

# jobs
[1]   Stopped                 dd if=/dev/file1 of=/dev/null
[2]-  Stopped                 dd if=/dev/file2 of=/dev/null
[3]   Running                 dd if=/dev/file3 of=/dev/null &
[4]+  Stopped                 dd if=/dev/file4 of=/dev/null
# kill %3 %2
# jobs
[1]-  Stopped                 dd if=/dev/file1 of=/dev/null
[2]   Terminated              dd if=/dev/file2 of=/dev/null
[3]   Terminated              dd if=/dev/file3 of=/dev/null
[4]+  Stopped                 dd if=/dev/file4 of=/dev/null
#

As always, remember to read the man pages for more information.