Re: (bash) How (really!) does the "current job" get determined?

On 07.10.2024 13:48, Kenny McCormack wrote:

 
What annoys me is that (in bash), most, but not all, of the job control
related commands take either a pid or a job number.  To be clear, what
annoys me is that they don't *all* do.  In particular, "fg" only takes a
job number.  "disown" takes either, which is a very good thing.  Wish they
all did.

I think that shell's job control purpose is to make job handling
simpler than using PIDs (even though PIDs are also displayed when
a background job gets started). But, yes, a consistent interface
accepting both would be a good thing [for all shell's job control
commands]. Incidentally Bolky/Korn notes: "When a command in this
section [Job Control] takes an argument called /job/, /job/ can be
a process id." - I don't know about Bash, but Kornshell at least
seems to have done it right.

Janis