suspend process question

[John E. Davis]

Hi,

   I have a program running in the background that writes to the status line
of my vt330. When I am in graphics mode on the terminal, the program which
updates the status line wrecks havoc once a minute with the graphicsc display.
So I would like to be able to start and stop the program at will. The program
is not listed by the `jobs' command since I create a forked child process that
exits as soon as the parent dies which effectively means that as soon as I
logout the program dies.  Anyway this is not the point; the point is that I
cannot do `stop %3' or whatever since the shell is not aware of the child. So
the bottom line is that csh job control will not work.

   What I currently do is to do `ps -aux | grep sline' (sline is the name of
the program) to get the pid, `pid', then do `kill -STOP `pid'' . Finally to
resume it I do kill -CONT `pid'.

   Is there an easier way???  How can I avoid getting the pid of the program
via `ps -aux' or perhaps make the program smart enough not to update the
status line (impossible, I think).

Thanks,
--
John

  bitnet: davis at ohstpy
internet: davis at pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu