My shell window have no prompt!

There are several possibilities to why you don't have a prompt. The most common reason is that you have a program running which occupies the shell window. This might for instance be Netscape&tm; or some other program that does not usually need a shell window but from which you have started a command. Whenever you start a program that opens its own window you should add a & at the end of the line. This instructs the shell to put the program in the background, i.e. releases the shell to do other tasks. If you already started the program it may not be necessary to restart it. If your shell have job control you can do the following to put the program in the background.
  1. Press ^Z, i.e. hold down the Control key and press Z at the same time. This will result in the text Stopped being printed and a prompt to appear.
  2. Type bg to the prompt and press return. This will result in the stopped job being put into the background.

© 1996 Matz Kindahl <matkin@docs.uu.se>
Last modified: Wed Aug 20 14:53:51 1997