Job control (computing)

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In computing, job control refers to the control of multiple tasks or jobs on a computer system, ensuring that they each have access to adequate resources to perform correctly, that competition for limited resources does not cause a deadlock where two or more jobs are unable to complete, resolving such situations where they do occur, and terminating jobs that, for any reason, are not performing as expected.

Job control has developed from the early days of computers where human operators were responsible for setting up, monitoring and controlling every job, to modern operating systems, which take on the bulk of the work of job control.

Even with a highly sophisticated scheduling system, some human intervention is desirable. Modern systems permit their users to stop and resume jobs, to execute them in the foreground (with the ability to interact with the user) or in the background. Unix-like systems follow this pattern.