How To Run Background Process in Linux

While working on your system, there are times you want specific processes to run in the background, i.e., they will continue to work. Still, they will not interpret the working of any other processes running in the foreground. Therefore, in this article, we will share with you the methods of sending the processes to the background in Linux.

Methods of Running a Process in the Background in Linux

For sending a process to the background in Linux, you can choose to follow any of the two methods explained below:

Method # 1: Using the Ampersand Operator

In this example, we will show you what happens to your terminal once you launch a program through it. We will launch the Firefox browser with the help of the following terminal command:

$ firefox

Once the Firefox browser launches, you will lose control of the terminal as shown below:

Now, if you want to run any other command on the terminal, you will not be able to do that because you no longer have control of the terminal. You will be able to execute a terminal command only if you close the Firefox browser or send it to the background. For sending any process to the background in Linux, you need to launch that process followed by the ampersand operator, as shown in the following command:

$ firefox &

Running this command will display a job ID on the terminal, as shown in the image below:

This time, the Firefox browser will launch on your system. However, you will still have control of the terminal in your hands, which means that you will still be able to execute other commands while the Firefox process will be running in the background, as shown in the following image:

Method # 2: Using the “bg” Command

In this method, we will launch the Firefox browser in the same manner as we did in our first method. The Firefox browser is shown in the image below:

Then, you need to press the Ctrl+ Z key combination to get control of the terminal back while the Firefox process will still be running, as shown in the following image:

After that, you need to run the following command:

$ bg

This command will push the Firefox process to the background, as shown in the following image:

How To View the Processes Running in the Background in Linux

If you ever want to view the processes running in the background in Linux, then you simply need to run the following command:

$ jobs

The background processes running on our Linux system are shown in the following image:

Conclusion

In this article, we shared the two different methods of sending a process to the background in Linux. You can pick any of these methods according to your personal preference to push a process of your choice to the background. Moreover, we even taught you how you could view all the processes running in the background. Therefore, after going through these methods, it will not be difficult for you anymore to run the processes in the background in Linux.