why do I get "Suspended (tty output)" in one terminal but not in others?

Question

Apparently I've done something strange/wrong in a tcsh shell, and now whenever I start an application in the background which prints to stdout the application is suspended (stopped). Weird thing is, this behavior only happens in this terminal; if I do the same in another terminal, the application just keeps running in the background and prints it output to the terminal. In the "broken" terminal I have to put the suspended application back into foreground (with `fg`) to have it continue. Example: ``` thehost:/tmp/test1(277)> ls -l & [3] 1454 thehost:/tmp/test1(278)> [3] + Suspended (tty output) ls --color=auto -l thehost:/tmp/test1(278)> fg ls --color=auto -l total 0 thehost:/tmp/test1(279)> ``` Same command executed in another terminal works fine: ``` thehost:/tmp/test1(8)> ls -l & [1] 2280 thehost:/tmp/test1(9)> total 0 [1] Done ls --color=auto -l thehost:/tmp/test1(9)> ``` Starting a bash in the affected terminal doesn't solve this either: ``` thehost:/tmp/test1(280)> bash oliver@th…

Accepted Answer

This will fix it:

```
stty -tostop
```

From the man page:

tostop (-tostop)

Send (do not send) SIGTTOU for background output. This causes background jobs to stop if they attempt terminal output.

This `tostop` is normally the default setting, as it's usually undesirable to mix the output of multiple jobs. So most people just want the foreground job to be able to print to the terminal.

why do I get "Suspended (tty output)" in one terminal but not in others?

Solution

Problem