redirecting io on background jobs

[whp at cbnap.UUCP]

Both csh and ksh allow the putting of foreground jobs into the background.
Unfortunately, the io of these jobs remains attached to the terminal.
The only option is to block the job on io, but what I really want is to
redirect the io someplace and let the job continue.  For example,
if I am doing a make but decide to do something else for a while, I want
to put the make in the background, and send its output to the file make.out,
or perhaps to lp, or even /dev/null.  What I don't want is to have the
make output continue to be sent to my terminal.

One answer is to have a blit or other terminal capable of windows and
window management.  One can then move the window with the make in it to
some unobtrusive corner of the screen, and start a new job in another
window.

How difficult would it be to modify ksh (or csh) to allow redirection of
io?  Would the tty driver need to be modified?
W. H. Pollock,	...!cbnap!whp