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Disco
Asked: 2011-11-01 07:32:25 +0800 CST

What does a lot of 'STOPPED' messages in bash mean?

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I'm having a weird issue. Sometimes on a quite loaded server i get a bunch of : 

# apt-get install sun-java6-jre
[1]+  Stopped                 apt-get install sun-java6-jre

or even

# (just hitting Return)
[1]+  Stopped                 apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-fonts

And then i can't do anything; all that does is returning me this 'stopped' line ...

What does that mean ? Too many processes ? How can i solve this ...

linux bash

2 Answers

  1. See Job Control

    You can use

    jobs # list the background jobs (by id number)

fg # to foreground the last background job

fg 3 # to foregroun background job with id '3'

    Note: sometimes people will inadvertently spawn jobs in the background by failing to escape special characters:

     wget http://sample.org/file.txt?ts=122&uid=guest

    instead of

     wget 'http://sample.org/file.txt?ts=122&uid=guest'

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  2. Best Answer

    +Stopped means someone (probably an admin) sent the process a SIGTSTP (STOP signal) which puts the process on hold (using Job Control). It's the same what happens when you press Ctrl+Z.

    This can probably be automated to keep runaway processes in check on a loaded server.

    To resume the process, try "fg".

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