Re: usability: exiting from GDB

[Andrew STUBBS <andrew dot stubbs at st dot com>]

John Pye wrote:
> I did try this, but not with a suitable examples, perhaps. For example,
> I was thinking of:
>
> kompare &
> ctrl-D
>
> Also note
> su
> wget http://example.com/bigfile.iso &
> ctrl-D
>
>
> There is no confirmation request in these case, although I'm not
> completely confident on drawing the distinction between these and the
> 'cat &' case that was given.
>
> As the programs that I tend to be working on are often like this, I
> hadn't really notices the 'stopped jobs' warning.

The examples you give are not stopped jobs. They are background jobs.

'cat &' starts cat and then tries to put it in the background, but it 
doesn't like that so it stops (I'm not sure what mechanism stops it). 
Other programs are less fussy - they will run in the back ground quite 
happily. When the shell quits, they continue running, still in the 
background.

Try this instead:

bash$ kompare
<Ctrl-Z>
bash$ <Ctrl-D>

The Ctrl-Z stops (pauses) the foreground job. By this mechanism you can 
reproduce the effect with any program that does not have special SIGSTOP 
handling.

Sorry if I sent you a slightly less than general case example.

Andrew