Managing Processes with bash

Debian is a multitasking system, so you need a way to do more than one
thing at once. Graphical environments like X provide a natural way to do
this; they allow multiple windows on the screen at any one time.
Naturally, bash (or any other shell) provides similar facilities.

Earlier you used top to look at the different processes on the system.
Your shell provides some convenient ways to keep track of only those
processes you've started from the command line. Each command line starts a
job (also called a process group) to be carried out by the shell. A job
can consist of a single process or a set of processes in a pipeline (more
on pipelines later).

Entering a command line will start a job. Try typing man cp, and the cp
manual page will appear on the screen. The shell will go into the
background and return when you finish reading the manual page (or you can
press q to quit rather than scrolling through the whole thing).

But say you're reading the manual page, and you want to do something else
for a minute. No problem. Press Ctrl-z while you're reading to suspend the
current foreground job and put the shell in the foreground. When you
suspend a job, bash will first give you some information on it, followed
by a shell prompt. You will see something like this on the screen:

NAME cp - copy files SYNOPSIS cp [options] source -More-

[1]+ Stopped man cp