The meaning of '-' and '+' symbol when background processes are finished?

Question

When I am running background processes like(I have 9 files suffixed by phastcon):

for i in *.phastcon; do cut -f 2 $i >$i.value & done

After kicking the "Enter", I get the output in terminal showing background id and process id,

[1] 22917
[2] 22918
[3] 22919
[4] 22920
[5] 22921
[6] 22922
[7] 22923
[8] 22924
[9] 22925

But hen finished, I got

[7]   Done                    cut -f 2 $i > $i.value
[8]-  Done                    cut -f 2 $i > $i.value
[1]   Done                    cut -f 2 $i > $i.value
[2]   Done                    cut -f 2 $i > $i.value
[3]   Done                    cut -f 2 $i > $i.value
[4]   Done                    cut -f 2 $i > $i.value
[5]   Done                    cut -f 2 $i > $i.value
[6]-  Done                    cut -f 2 $i > $i.value
[9]+  Done                    cut -f 2 $i > $i.value

The results are all right.

But I can not understand what is the difference of '-' and '+' after the square.

Thank you for all helps!

Tong

Answer 1

From the bash manpage, in the section "JOB CONTROL":

In output pertaining to jobs (e.g., the output of the jobs command), the current job is always flagged with a +, and the previous job with a -.

This explains the + behind the [9], because that was the last job started. It also explains the - behind [8] and [6], because they were the previous jobs at the moment they finished ([6] was the previous job because [7] and [8] finished before it).