Last time I focused on using screen for multiple terminal sessions. Today, I will use a built in Linux ability to accomplish similar results. In Linux, you have the ability to start utilities and send them to the background. Once they are in the background, you can of course, bring them to the foreground again.
Using a keyboard shortcut and a couple of commands; you can do this easily.

ssh -p 22 user@remotehost

Start a task on the remote host and send it to the background:

$top

At this point, using ctl+z, you can send ‘top’ into the background:

$ top

[1]+ Stopped           top
$

Start Irssi:

$irssi

Send it to the background with ctl+z

$irssi

[2]+   Stoppped         irssi
$

Then check the background jobs running with ‘jobs’:

$jobs
[1]-  Stopped        top
[2]+  Stopped        irssi
$

Now to come back to the local terminal without killing the ssh session, use shift+~ followed separately by ctl+z (the ~ will not show up in the terminal until after you issue the ctl+z)

$ ~^Z [susend ssh]

[3]+
$

You have now returned to the local shell without actually exiting the ssh session.

now check jobs again:

$jobs
[1]   Stopped       top
[2]-  Stopped       irssi
[3]+  Stopped       ssh -p 22 user@remotehost
$

In order to bring the jobs back to the foreground, we use fg n (n being the number of the background job)

fg 1

This brings top to the foreground and you access each of the other processes in the same way using the corosponding number from the list produced by the ‘jobs’ command.

it is that simple to use a single terminal to perform multiple tasks! Enjoy the CLI and
Happy Slackin!
usr

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