Yes, the final answer will be to upgrade, but I still wonder why telnet can suspend but nothing else. When I say telnet suspends, I don't mean just to the ttrtelnet prompt. It will suspend all the way back to the bash prompt, and I can bring it back with the fg command. But when I try to suspend any other jobs, bash says "cannot suspend on a shell without job control." I am thinking that the telnet program invokes a subshell with some switches or variables or something that lest it suspend. Is there a switch or flag or option or variable that allows job control? The susp character is set to control z according to stty -a.