Temporarily Suspending a Process

Let's say you want to suspend a process and let it resume at another time. You can't use Ctrl + Z because the process will simply continue to run in the background. But there's a simple solution to this using unix signals.

Find your process id (using something like ps) and then send a STOP signal to it. For example, let's pause our SCP process. Assume that a ps reveals the process id to be 1000:

# kill -STOP 1000

To resume, you would simply run this:

# kill -CONT 1000

Using this technique, you can have finer granularity on control of your running processes.