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The Signal Belfry

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SIG-007 · Stop and resume

SIGTSTP

Ctrl+Z: the pause that comes from the keyboard and can be refused.

The terminal stop: SIGSTOP's polite sibling, rung by the terminal driver when you press Ctrl+Z. It was born with BSD job control, in the late seventies — the then-radical idea of pausing a program and keeping the same terminal.

Unlike its sibling, this one can be caught: editors like vim use the chance to restore the screen before stopping — and to take it back on fg. The shell keeps the list in jobs; bg releases the process into the background.

$ vim notas.md
^Z
[1]+  Stopped                 vim notas.md
$ jobs
[1]+  Stopped                 vim notas.md
$ fg
(vim comes back with the screen intact)
Paused by the keyboard, resumed by fg.