Background

I often use Lynx due to several reasons.¹

Problem

While browsing the Internet with Lynx, one can spawn the shell, so that one can resume the browsing session after executing some commands.

When one wants to exit the shell invoked by ‘!’ in Lynx, the command required is the same as the one needed for logging out: exit. These are pretty easy.

However, in Linux text mode, if one typed some commands and the contents in the browser were completely covered by the output of these commands, how can one distinguishs a shell started by Lynx from the one that simply exists after one has logged in?

Solution

At first, I typed ps aux | grep lynx to determine whether Lynx was running. After that, I issued ps, and got a small list of running processes. Then I tried adding the letters a, u, and x after the previous command.

• a: Received processes from all TTY consoles, instead of the current one.
• x: A STAT column was shown.
• u: More details were shown, including the STAT column.

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