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Normally, the shell tells you about changes to your background jobs whenever it prints its prompt. That is, when you do something that makes the shell give you a prompt, you'll get a message like:
[1] + Stopped (tty input) rm -r %
This message tells you that the rm -r command, which you're running in the background, needs input; it has probably asked you whether or not to delete a read-only file, or something similar.
This default behavior is usually what you want. By waiting until it prints a prompt, the shell minimizes "damage" to your screen. If you want to be notified immediately when a job changes state, you should set the variable notify:
% set notify ...csh, tcsh $ set -o notify ...bash, ksh $ setopt notify ...zsh
The drawback, of course, is that you may be analyzing a screenful of output that you've laboriously constructed, only to have that screen "destroyed" by a lot of messages from the shell. Therefore, most users prefer to leave notify off (unset). To stop all background output, use stty tostop (Section 23.9).
-- ML
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| 23.7. System Overloaded? Try Stopping Some Jobs |  | 23.9. Stop Background Output with stty tostop |
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