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user unknown
Asked: 2012-05-19 17:45:28 +0800 CST

Ctrl-Z equivalent for GUI Programs?

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I often have to run the update manager on a slow connection, and while reading my emails, I meanwhile would like to surf for 2 minutes in the web, then have the full bandwidth again for the update manager.

From the command line, I can suspend a running process with Ctrl+Z, aka suspend. But if I didn't start the program from the shell - can I do it with some signal and the kill command?

I read the man page for signal (man -a signal), but there I didn't find a SIGSUSPEND, only SIGSTOP, SIGTERM, SIGINT and such - which is appropriate, or is there none?

suspend signal

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    For the general case you can stop (suspend a process or process group as below):

    Control-Z is
    kill pidnumber -SIGSTOP
    to continue:
    kill pidnumber -SIGCONT

    Alternatively, to suspend an entire process group:
    kill -groupnumber -SIGSTOP
    and
    kill -groupnumber -SIGCONT

    Of course if you suspend a process with some element that is timed, it may not continue properly. In the use case mentioned, the repository server is timing data transfer acknowledgments, it can time-out the transfer because your client has 'gone away' or slow it down because there is 'network congestion'.

    I certainly wouldn't suspend update-manager while it was updating my packages, either.

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