fg

Unix, actually, with a little Hayes modem thrown in at the end.

Ashley, for her own inscrutable purposes, posted "fg". In most Unix shells that's the command to bring the most recent background job (process group) into the foreground - attach it to the tty so it receives user input, roughly speaking.

Various people have posted error messages you can get from various Unix shells if there is no background job to be brought into the foreground. Tim went a bit further:

":wq" is the command in the vi editor to "write and quit". If the background job you had just brought into the foreground was a vi session. This is quite common when you have only one tty - you start editing and then need to interrupt that to do some other things, so you stop (but don't terminate) the vi session, do what you need to do, and then use "fg" to resume it, you might then use :wq to exit vi.

":q!" is the vi "quit even if there are unsaved changes" command.

foreground job and return to the shell. "exit" is the shell command to exit the shell, in many shells.

virtual-terminal mode and into command mode.

sends the interrupt signal to the foreground process group. That usually terminates whatever's running in the foreground.

terminal quit control character, which sends the quit signal to the foreground process group. Often processes which catch and handle the interrupt signal don't catch the quit signal, so if a process is wedged and ignoring interrupt, sometimes quit will kill it.

"+++" is the attention sequence for Hayes modems (and other modems that use the Hayes command language, which is most of the async ones). It tells the modem that the next character will begin a modem command sequence, rather than being data to pbutt to the remote end.

"ATH" is Hayes for "ATtention, Hang up". It hangs up the modem.

So what Tim has here seems to be a little narrative, in Unix and Hayes, of a frustrated Unix user trying to regain control of the shell, and finally giving up and hanging up their dial-up session. I'm sure for many people here it brings back fond memories...

--

Auden often writes like Disney. Like Disney, he knows the shape of beasts -- (& incidently he, too, might have a company of artists producing his lines) -- unlike Lawrence, he does not know what shapes or motivates these beasts. -- Dylan Thomas