All Articles for

Background Process

A background process is a computer process that runs "behind the scenes" (i.e. in the background) and without user intervention. Typical tasks for these processes include logging, system monitoring, scheduling, and user notification. On a Unix system, a background process or job can be further identified as one whose group ID differs from its terminal group ID. This type of process is unable to receive keyboard signals from and typically will not send output to its parent terminal.