“You know all about multitasking on the desktop, but some Linux
users aren’t aware that you can do exactly the same kind of things
in the console, albeit with a little more hands on control. In this
article we’ll run through the basics of job control in Linux.“In a graphical environment, such as your window manager, you
can run multiple console tasks at once simply by opening more
terminal emulators (such as xterm, aterm, etc). If you’re stuck
with just the single terminal, or you just don’t want to clutter
your desktop with a lot of windows, then you need to control the
running of console programs…”