FG(1) General Commands Manual FG(1)

fg — run jobs in the foreground


fg [job_id]

If job control is enabled (see the description of set -m), the shell is interactive, and the current shell execution environment (see 2.13 Shell Execution Environment) is not a subshell environment, the fg utility shall move a background job in the current execution environment into the foreground, as described in 2.11 Job Control; it may also do so if the shell is non-interactive or the current shell execution environment is a subshell environment.

Using fg to place a job into the foreground shall remove its process ID from the list of those "known in the current shell execution environment"; see 2.9.3.1 Asynchronous AND-OR Lists.

None.

The following operand shall be supported:

job_id
Specify the job to be run as a foreground job. If no job_id operand is given, the job_id for the job that was most recently suspended, placed in the background, or run as a background job shall be used. The format of job_id is described in XBD 3.182 Job ID .

Not used.

None.

The following environment variables shall affect the execution of fg:

Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See XBD for the precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale categories.)
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.
Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).

Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.
[ XSI] Determine the location of messages objects and message catalogs.

Default.

The fg utility shall write the command line of the job to standard output in the following format:

"%s\n", <command>

The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.

None.

None.

If the fg utility succeeds, it does not return an exit status. Instead, the shell waits for the job that fg moved into the foreground.

If fg does not move a job into the foreground, the following exit value shall be returned:

An error occurred.

If job control is disabled, the fg utility shall exit with an error and no job shall be placed in the foreground.

This utility is required to be intrinsic. See 1.7 Intrinsic Utilities for details.

The fg utility does not work as expected when it is operating in its own utility execution environment because that environment has no applicable jobs to manipulate. See the APPLICATION USAGE section for bg(1). For this reason, fg is generally implemented as a shell regular built-in.

None.

The extensions to the shell specified in this volume of POSIX.1-2024 have mostly been based on features provided by the KornShell. The job control features provided by bg(1), fg, and jobs(1) are also based on the KornShell. The standard developers examined the characteristics of the C shell versions of these utilities and found that differences exist. Despite widespread use of the C shell, the KornShell versions were selected for this volume of POSIX.1-2024 to maintain a degree of uniformity with the rest of the KornShell features selected (such as the very popular command line editing features).

None.

2.9.3.1 Asynchronous AND-OR Lists, 2.13 Shell Execution Environment, bg(1) , kill(1), jobs(1), wait(1)

XBD V1_chap03(7), V1_chap08(7)

First released in Issue 4.

This utility is marked as part of the User Portability Utilities option.

The APPLICATION USAGE section is added.

The JC marking is removed from the SYNOPSIS since job control is mandatory is this version.

Austin Group Defect 854 is applied, adding a note to the APPLICATION USAGE section that this utility is required to be intrinsic.

Austin Group Defect 1122 is applied, changing the description of NLSPATH .

Austin Group Defect 1254 is applied, updating the DESCRIPTION to account for the addition of 2.11 Job Control and changing the EXIT STATUS section.

June 14, 2024 posix.fail