Using fg with screen

Question

I have a running job in a ssh terminal on an external server. I can pause it with CTRL + Z and resume it with fg. But I would like to pause it, run screen screen -S my_job and get it back in front with fg. It does not work. Is there a way to do something like this?

The reason is that my job is running quite a long time (1 month) and will run for two more months. If my desktop computer dies because of a blackout, my job will be killed.

Answer 1

The issue here is the controlling terminal of the job. I'm not aware of any method to change the controlling terminal, which you'd need to do if you wanted to move your program into a screen.

However, if your job has no important input or output on its standard input/output/error, you might consider the shell builtin disown, which removes a background job from the table of active jobs. This implies that the shell will not send the job a SIGHUP when it dies (e.g. due to connection failure of your ssh'ing host). Example:

$ long-running-job
^Z
$ bg
(shell displays backgrounding notification)
$ disown

And your job should run on. It's I/O will be closed, though, so that's no help if you have any stdin/stdout/stderr activity.