Foregroundprosessi

Foregroundprosessi refers to a process that is currently attached to a terminal and has control of user interaction. In most Unix-like systems, processes belong to a process group, and the terminal designates one process group as the foreground group for interactive input and output.

When a process runs in the foreground, the terminal is effectively dedicated to that process. The shell waits for it to complete or be moved to the background, and the user can interact directly with the process. Signals such as Ctrl-C (SIGINT) are delivered to the foreground process group.

Operating systems provide job control to manage foreground and background processes. Users can move a process between modes using shell commands such as fg to bring a background job to the foreground, or bg to resume a stopped job in the background. The shell manages process groups and the controlling terminal.

Background processes do not have control of the terminal; the terminal accepts input only for the foreground group. They may still write output, which can be interleaved with the shell prompt. Background tasks are common for daemons or long-running, non-interactive tasks.

Common examples include interactive editors or compilers when run in foreground, or scripts that require user input. Foreground mode is suitable for tasks that require direct user interaction, while background mode allows tasks to run without blocking the terminal.

See also: foreground process, background process, process group, controlling terminal, job control, SIGINT.