Can a shell function tell if it’s part of a pipeline running in the background? I want to write a shell function that traps SIGCONT and does one thing or another thing depending on whether the function is CONTinuing in the background. Can’t see how to do it. Furthermore, it’s not clear to me why a backgrounded function thinks its pid is the pid of the shell that spawned it. 0 Wed 0:12:34 DaveBook yost /tmp 250 Z% function foo() { print foo says pid is $$ sleep 2 } 0 Wed 0:12:56 DaveBook yost /tmp 251 Z% foo & ps xl -t ttys004 | sort -k 2 [1] 26183 foo says pid is 25935 UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND 0 25934 226 0 143 0 2503604 2316 - Ss s004 0:00.01 login -pf yost /bin/zsh 502 25935 25934 0 31 0 2500064 2512 - S s004 0:00.14 -zsh 502 26183 25935 0 163 5 2500064 588 - SN s004 0:00.00 -zsh 0 26184 25935 0 45 0 2433268 644 - R+ s004 0:00.00 ps xl -t ttys004 502 26185 26183 0 1074014208 5 2432764 500 - SN s004 0:00.00 sleep 2 502 26186 25935 0 1074104586 0 2432800 500 - R+ s004 0:00.00 sort -k 2 0 Wed 0:13:00 DaveBook yost /tmp 252 Z% [1] + 26183 done foo 0 Wed 0:13:02 DaveBook yost /tmp 252 Z% print pid is $$ pid is 25935 0 Wed 0:21:00 DaveBook yost /tmp 253 Z% I get the same thing even if I do this function foo() {( print foo says pid is $$ sleep 2 )} foo & or this function foo() { ( print foo says pid is $$ sleep 2 ) & } foo