Pause a screen terminal

Question

I constantly use terminal screens to manage different tasks in linux. I would like to know if is possible to 'pause' or 'suspend' a given screen and resume it later (no reboot in between).

Let's say that I create the following screen:

screen -S R

Then I start R and let a process running:

for(lop in 1:1000000){
print(lop)}

There is a way to say something like:

screen -X -S R pause

And resume afterwards wit something like:

 screen -X -S R pause

My whole point is to release some processing power temporarily without killing long processes. I would be glad for any light here.

Solution

Since you started screen with screen -S R, you initially started with a shell inside the screen session, probably bash. So, you could take advantage of bash's job management by pressing Ctrl+Z to suspend the R process, and then resume it later with fg:

[1] 7221
[1] 7222
[1] 7223
[1] 7224
^Z
[1]+  Stopped                 R

$ fg
[1] 7225

Comments

[Dan]

The same can be achieved by using kill -s 19 <processid> to pause a process (Sends a SIGSTOP which is the same as the Ctrl+Z shortcut) and kill -s 18 <pid> to resume it (Sends a SIGCONT which is the same as typing fg).