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up vote 4 down vote favorite

In the bash terminal I can hit Control+Z to suspend any running proccess... then I can type fg to resume the proccess.

Is it possible to suspend a process if I only have it's PID? And if so, what command should I use?

I'm looking for something like:

suspend-proccess $PID_OF_PROCCESS

and then to resume it with

resume-proccess $PID_OF_PROCCESS
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2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

As maxschlepzig said you could use kill

kill -SIGSTOP [pid]

and

kill -SIGCONT [pid]
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4  
Unless there are other reasons for it, I would prefer SIGTSTP over SIGSTOP, as some applications do handle SIGTSTP specially. For example, if scp is showing a progress bar, SIGTSTP will cause it to clean up the terminal mode before suspending, but if you send SIGSTOP, it will not have a chance to do so. – ephemient Sep 15 '10 at 21:55
1  
@ephemient I tried SIGTSTP, I saw what you were saying about it cleaning up the terminal. Thanks for the explanation of SIGTSTP, alawys good to learn new things :) – Steve Burdine Sep 15 '10 at 22:38
up vote 4 down vote

You should use

kill

To be more verbose - you have to specify the right signal:

kill -TSTP
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