Unix command problem

Question

Sometimes I'll use the 'bg' command to run a process in the background so I can do other tasks in the same terminal window.
For some reason, I still get the output of the process even though I said BG, not FG (foreground, of course).
My roomate runs Linux and he doesn't have this problem, does this make sense to anyone?

Answer 1

Let me make sure that I understand correctly. I assume that you start a job, then type ctrl-z to suspend it and then type bg to put it into the background.
If so, and if you are getting output to the screen, then I would conclude that the screen is still the standard output device. What I would do is redirect the output to a file. In fact, you can start the job in background mode. If your process is myjob, then this command
myjob > outfile &
will send the output from myjob to the file outfile and the "&" puts the job into the background.
I hope this helps.
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