I'm sure you and gerry and all are right. I'm glad you tried the trick and know that the Xserver and spawned subshells and ptys are decent options besides the interactive command line interface. Tcl/Tk is still useful. And your good IBM reference suggests redirecting background output to a file. Probably how log files were invented. I'm recovering from a big adventure today. I drove for an hour to Cambridge to check out Goodwill electronics. Never been there before but just as I started looking around the small electronics area some employee decided to park his cart and started dumping nice stuff for recycling. He didn't take my hint to maybe give me a chance to look first. Last thing I need is to get arrested making a fuss at Goodwill for their junk 50 miles away. So I quick grabbed 2 once fancy cd players and, with senior discount, paid $15 for both. And I heard some great old music in the car coming home. Checking the inside of these cd units they look great. So I don't know what is going on these days. A confused old guy needs to be careful to stay out of trouble. Iznogoud wrote: > Your 'xterm&; xterm&;' has a few issues to point out. First, you do not need > the semi-colon at all. And second, you are spawning processes that need to > connect to an X server, which is where the "user interface" lives for them. > "User interface" was just ambiguous here, methinks. > > No file descriptors are passed around with creating background processes; those > are possible only when done programatically, although there are exceptions. > > OK, so I looked for the rest, especially the "reverse" setting of "tostop". > There isn't one. All of what I know, and likely all of what exists, is here: > https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.1.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r1.bpxa400/bpxug212.htm > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >