Job (computing)

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In computing, a job is a unit of work or unit of execution (that performs said work). A component of a job (as a unit of work) is called a task or a step (if sequential, as in a job stream). As a unit of execution, a job may be concretely identified with a single process, which may in turn have subprocesses (child processes; the process corresponding to the job being the parent process) which perform the tasks or steps that comprise the work of the job; or with a process group; or with an abstract reference to a process or process group, as in Unix job control.

Jobs can be started interactively, such as from a command line, or scheduled for non-interactive execution by a job scheduler, and then controlled via automatic or manual job control. Jobs that have finite input can complete, successfully or unsuccessfully, or fail to complete and eventually be terminated. By contrast, online processing such as by servers has open-ended input (they service requests as long as they run), and thus never complete, only stopping when terminated (sometimes called "canceled"): a server's job is never done.