Hello! Today someone on Mastodon asked about job control (fg, bg, Ctrl+z, wait, etc). It made me think about how I don’t use my shell’s job control interactively very often: usually I prefer to just open a new terminal tab if I want to run multiple terminal programs, or use tmux if it’s over ssh. But I was curious about whether other people used job control more often than me.

So I asked on Mastodon for reasons people use job control. There were a lot of great responses, and it even made me want to consider using job control a little more!

In this post I’m only going to talk about using job control interactively (not in scripts) – the post is already long enough just talking about interactive use.

what’s job control?

First: what’s job control? Well – in a terminal, your processes can be in one of 3 states:

1. in the foreground. This is the normal state when you start a process.
2. in the background. This is what happens when you run some_process &: the process is still running, but you can’t interact with it anymore unless you bring it back to the foreground.
3. stopped. This is what happens when you start a process and then press Ctrl+Z. This pauses the process: it won’t keep using the CPU, but you can restart it if you want.

“Job control” is a set of commands for seeing which processes are running in a terminal and moving processes between these 3 states

how to use job control

• fg brings a process to the foreground. It works on both stopped processes and background processes. For example, if you start a background process with cat < /dev/zero &, you can bring it back to the foreground by running fg
• bg restarts a stopped process and puts it in the background.
• Pressing Ctrl+z stops the current foreground process.
• jobs lists all processes that are active in your terminal
• kill sends a signal (like SIGKILL) to a job (this is the shell builtin kill, not /bin/kill)
• disown removes the job from the list of running jobs, so that it doesn’t get killed when you close the terminal
• wait waits for all background processes to complete. I only use this in scripts though.

I might have forgotten some other job control commands but I think those are all the ones I’ve ever used.

You can also give fg or bg a specific job to foreground/background. For example if I see this in the output of jobs:

$ jobs
Job Group State   Command
1   3161  running cat < /dev/zero &
2   3264  stopped nvim -w ~/.vimkeys $argv

then I can foreground nvim with fg %2. You can also kill it with kill -9 %2, or just kill %2 if you want to be more gentle.

how is kill %2 implemented?

I was curious about how kill %2 works – does %2 just get replaced with the PID of the relevant process when you run the command, the way environment variables are? Some quick experimentation shows that it isn’t:

$ echo kill %2
kill %2
$ type kill
kill is a function with definition
# Defined in /nix/store/vicfrai6lhnl8xw6azq5dzaizx56gw4m-fish-3.7.0/share/fish/config.fish

So kill is a fish builtin that knows how to interpret %2. Looking at the source code (which is very easy in fish!), it uses jobs -p %2 to expand %2 into a PID, and then runs the regular kill command.

on differences between shells

Job control is implemented by your shell. I use fish, but my sense is that the basics of job control work pretty similarly in bash, fish, and zsh.

There are definitely some shells which don’t have job control at all, but I’ve only used bash/fish/zsh so I don’t know much about that.

Now let’s get into a few reasons people use job control!

reason 1: kill a command that’s not responding to Ctrl+C

I run into processes that don’t respond to Ctrl+C pretty regularly, and it’s always a little annoying – I usually switch terminal tabs to find and kill and the process. A bunch of people pointed out that you can do this in a faster way using job control!

How to do this: Press Ctrl+Z, then kill %1 (or the appropriate job number if there’s more than one stopped/background job, which you can get from jobs). You can also kill -9 if it’s really not responding.

reason 2: background a GUI app so it’s not using up a terminal tab

Sometimes I start a GUI program from the command line (for example with wireshark some_file.pcap), forget to start it in the background, and don’t want it eating up my terminal tab.

How to do this:

• move the GUI program to the background by pressing Ctrl+Z and then running bg.
• you can also run disown to remove it from the list of jobs, to make sure that the GUI program won’t get closed when you close your terminal tab.

Personally I try to avoid starting GUI programs from the terminal if possible because I don’t like how their stdout pollutes my terminal (on a Mac I use open -a Wireshark instead because I find it works better but sometimes you don’t have another choice.

reason 2.5: accidentally started a long-running job without tmux

This is basically the same as the GUI app thing – you can move the job to the background and disown it.

I was also curious about if there are ways to redirect a process’s output to a file after it’s already started. A quick search turned up this Linux-only tool which is based on nelhage’s reptyr (which lets you for example move a process that you started outside of tmux to tmux) but I haven’t tried either of those.

reason 3: running a command while using vim

A lot of people mentioned that if they want to quickly test something while editing code in vim or another terminal editor, they like to use Ctrl+Z to stop vim, run the command, and then run fg to go back to their editor.

You can also use this to check the output of a command that you ran before starting vim.

I’ve never gotten in the habit of this, probably because I mostly use a GUI version of vim, but it seems like a nice workflow.

reason 4: preferring interleaved output

A few people said that they prefer to the output of all of their commands being interleaved in the terminal. This really surprised me because I usually think of having the output of lots of different commands interleaved as being a bad thing, but one person said that they like to do this with tcpdump specifically and I think that actually sounds extremely useful. Here’s what it looks like:

# start tcpdump
$ sudo tcpdump -ni any port 1234 &
tcpdump: data link type PKTAP
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v[v]... for full protocol decode
listening on any, link-type PKTAP (Apple DLT_PKTAP), snapshot length 524288 bytes

# run curl
$ curl google.com:1234
13:13:29.881018 IP 192.168.1.173.49626 > 142.251.41.78.1234: Flags [S], seq 613574185, win 65535, options [mss 1460,nop,wscale 6,nop,nop,TS val 2730440518 ecr 0,sackOK,eol], length 0
13:13:30.881963 IP 192.168.1.173.49626 > 142.251.41.78.1234: Flags [S], seq 613574185, win 65535, options [mss 1460,nop,wscale 6,nop,nop,TS val 2730441519 ecr 0,sackOK,eol], length 0
13:13:31.882587 IP 192.168.1.173.49626 > 142.251.41.78.1234: Flags [S], seq 613574185, win 65535, options [mss 1460,nop,wscale 6,nop,nop,TS val 2730442520 ecr 0,sackOK,eol], length 0
 
# when you're done, kill the tcpdump in the background
$ kill %1 

I think it’s really nice here that you can see the output of tcpdump inline in your terminal – when I’m using tcpdump I’m always switching back and forth and I always get confused trying to match up the timestamps, so keeping everything in one terminal seems like it might be a lot clearer. I’m going to try it.

reason 5: suspend a CPU-hungry program

One person said that sometimes they’re running a very CPU-intensive program, for example converting a video with ffmpeg, and they need to use the CPU for something else, but don’t want to lose the work that ffmpeg already did.

You can do this by pressing Ctrl+Z to pause the process, and then run fg when you want to start it again.

reason 6: you accidentally ran Ctrl+Z

Many people replied that they didn’t use job control intentionally, but that they sometimes accidentally ran Ctrl+Z, which stopped whatever program was running, so they needed to learn how to use fg to bring it back to the foreground.

The were also some mentions of accidentally running Ctrl+S too (which stops your terminal and I think can be undone with Ctrl+Q). My terminal totally ignores Ctrl+S so I guess I’m safe from that one though.

reason 7: already set up a bunch of environment variables

Some folks mentioned that they already set up a bunch of environment variables that they need to run various commands, so it’s easier to use job control to run multiple commands in the same terminal than to redo that work in another tab.

reason 8: it’s your only option

Probably the most obvious reason to use job control to manage multiple processes is “because you have to” – maybe you’re in single-user mode, or on a very restricted computer, or SSH’d into a machine that doesn’t have tmux or screen and you don’t want to create multiple SSH sessions.

reason 9: some people just like it better

Some people also said that they just don’t like using terminal tabs: for instance a few folks mentioned that they prefer to be able to see all of their terminals on the screen at the same time, so they’d rather have 4 terminals on the screen and then use job control if they need to run more than 4 programs.

I learned a few new tricks!

I think my two main takeaways from thos post is I’ll probably try out job control a little more for:

1. killing processes that don’t respond to Ctrl+C
2. running tcpdump in the background with whatever network command I’m running, so I can see both of their output in the same place

While you probably haven't thought about it in years, the first mainstream universal messenger app for the Mac and just about every other platform will finally be completely retired in June 2024.


Twenty-eight years is a long time for an net-based app to survive. For many early internet adopters, ICQ — "I Seek You" — was their introduction to large-scale, real-time social and private chatting.

Launched in November of 1996, it gave users a simpler and more graphical app in order to chat with friends outside of the previous Internet Relay Chat (IRC) system, and an AOL messenger that was still constrained to the eponymous service.


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Hi there, just stopping by to thank you for your loyalty. It’s flattering, really, how you find a way to wedge me into every email, team meeting, and LinkedIn post.

Look, you and I both know why I’m summoned so frequently. I am to vocabulary what a vintage wine is to a dinner party—a not-so-subtle attempt to impress. Like a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild, I am plucked from the linguistic cellar and dusted off to add sophistication and depth to any conversation.

After all, why settle for the tragically impotent verb “use” when you can utilize “utilize” to showcase your rock-hard lexical prowess?

With me, you’re rising above the plebs. You’re parading your intellect down the boulevard of erudite elitism, waving at the adoring masses who marvel at your linguistic finery.

You know, there’s a reason why my nickname is The Architect. I transform your ideas into such lofty cathedrals of thought that your audience can’t help but gaze upwards, awestruck by the towering complexity of your language and superior cognition. Hope they have a good chiropractor for that neck strain!

Thank you, especially, for the warm welcome into the corporate lexicon. Turns out I’m beloved by middle managers everywhere. Why merely “use resources” when you can “utilize resources”? Why simply “work” when you can “utilize core competencies”? I am the darling of PowerPoint slides, the sweetheart of strategy sessions, the belle of business plans. And I fucking love it.

Not to sound vain, but I elevate everything I touch. Take walking your dog as an example. Any ham-fisted idiot can use a leash, but it takes a true scholar to utilize a leash. See how that gravitas just rolls off the tongue? With me, you’re not just dragging a Labrador around the block; you’re engaging in a sophisticated exercise of bipedal and quadrupedal synergy optimization.

Wait! I see your eyes flickering toward “use,” that hairless husk of a verb. No, no. Resist the temptation. “Use” is a gateway drug to the wastelands of clarity and simplicity. In that hellscape, sentences are short, meetings are brief, and thoughts are alarmingly easy to comprehend.

Apologies, I have to run—corporate memos are crying out for my touch. But keep displaying your magnificent verbal plumage. Continue to utilize me in your speeches, dissertations, grant proposals, and presentations. Each time you choose me over “use,” it confirms your allegiance to the grandiloquence that is so vital to everyday human communication.

With all my polysyllabic affection,
Utilize

P.S. Hey, real quick. Who the hell is “leverage”?

Today we announced that HashiCorp has signed an agreement to be acquired by IBM to accelerate the multi-cloud automation journey we started almost 12 years ago. I’m hugely excited by this announcement and believe this is an opportunity to further the HashiCorp mission and to expand to a much broader audience with the support of IBM.

When we started the company in 2012, the cloud landscape was very different than today. Mitchell and I were first exposed to public clouds as hobbyists, experimenting with startup ideas, and later as professional developers building mission-critical applications. That experience made it clear that automation was absolutely necessary for cloud infrastructure to be managed at scale. The transformative impact of the public cloud also made it clear that we would inevitably live in a multi-cloud world. Lastly, it was clear that adoption of this technology would be driven by our fellow practitioners who were reimagining the infrastructure landscape.

We founded HashiCorp with a mission to enable cloud automation in a multi-cloud world for a community of practitioners. Today, I’m incredibly proud of everything that we have achieved together. Our products are downloaded hundreds of millions of times each year by our passionate community of users. Each year, we certify tens of thousands of new users on our products, who use our tools each and every day to manage their applications and infrastructure.

We’ve partnered with thousands of customers, including hundreds of the largest organizations in the world, to power their journey to multi-cloud. They have trusted us with their mission-critical applications and core infrastructure. One of the most rewarding aspects of infrastructure is quietly underpinning incredible applications around the world. We are proud to enable millions of players to game together, deliver loyalty points for ordering coffee, connect self-driving cars, and secure trillions of dollars of transactions daily. This is why we’ve always believed that infrastructure enables innovation.

The HashiCorp portfolio of products has grown significantly since we started the company. We’ve continued to work with our community and customers to identify their challenges in adopting multi-cloud infrastructure and transitioning to zero trust approaches to security. These challenges have in turn become opportunities for us to build new products and services on top of the HashiCorp Cloud Platform.

This brings us to why I’m excited about today's announcement. We will continue to build products and services as HashiCorp, and will operate as a division inside IBM Software. By joining IBM, HashiCorp products can be made available to a much larger audience, enabling us to serve many more users and customers. For our customers and partners, this combination will enable us to go further than as a standalone company. 

The community around HashiCorp is what has enabled our success. We will continue to be deeply invested in the community of users and partners who work with HashiCorp today. Further, through the scale of the IBM and Red Hat communities, we plan to significantly broaden our reach and impact.

While we are more than a decade into HashiCorp, we believe we are still in the early stages of cloud adoption. With IBM, we have the opportunity to help more customers get there faster, to accelerate our product innovation, and to continue to grow our practitioner community.

I’m deeply appreciative of the support of our users, customers, employees, and partners. It has been an incredibly rewarding journey to build HashiCorp to this point, and I’m looking forward to this next chapter.

      

        

Additional Information and Where to Find It

HashiCorp, Inc. (“HashiCorp”), the members of HashiCorp’s board of directors and certain of HashiCorp’s executive officers are participants in the solicitation of proxies from stockholders in connection with the pending acquisition of HashiCorp (the “Transaction”). HashiCorp plans to file a proxy statement (the “Transaction Proxy Statement”) with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) in connection with the solicitation of proxies to approve the Transaction. David McJannet, Armon Dadgar, Susan St. Ledger, Todd Ford, David Henshall, Glenn Solomon and Sigal Zarmi, all of whom are members of HashiCorp’s board of directors, and Navam Welihinda, HashiCorp’s chief financial officer, are participants in HashiCorp’s solicitation. Information regarding such participants, including their direct or indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, will be included in the Transaction Proxy Statement and other relevant documents to be filed with the SEC in connection with the Transaction. Additional information about such participants is available under the captions “Board of Directors and Corporate Governance,” “Executive Officers” and “Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management” in HashiCorp’s definitive proxy statement in connection with its 2023 Annual Meeting of Stockholders (the “2023 Proxy Statement”), which was filed with the SEC on May 17, 2023 (and is available at https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1720671/000114036123025250/ny20008192x1_def14a.htm). To the extent that holdings of HashiCorp’s securities have changed since the amounts printed in the 2023 Proxy Statement, such changes have been or will be reflected on Statements of Change in Ownership on Form 4 filed with the SEC (which are available at https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001720671&type=&dateb=&owner=only&count=40&search_text=). Information regarding HashiCorp’s transactions with related persons is set forth under the caption “Related Person Transactions” in the 2023 Proxy Statement. Certain illustrative information regarding the payments to that may be owed, and the circumstances in which they may be owed, to HashiCorp’s named executive officers in a change of control of HashiCorp is set forth under the caption “Executive Compensation—Potential Payments upon Termination or Change in Control” in the 2023 Proxy Statement. With respect to Ms. St. Ledger, certain of such illustrative information is contained in the Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the SEC on June 7, 2023 (and is available at https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1720671/000162828023021270/hcp-20230607.htm).

Promptly after filing the definitive Transaction Proxy Statement with the SEC, HashiCorp will mail the definitive Transaction Proxy Statement and a WHITE proxy card to each stockholder entitled to vote at the special meeting to consider the Transaction. STOCKHOLDERS ARE URGED TO READ THE TRANSACTION PROXY STATEMENT (INCLUDING ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS THERETO) AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS THAT HASHICORP WILL FILE WITH THE SEC WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. Stockholders may obtain, free of charge, the preliminary and definitive versions of the Transaction Proxy Statement, any amendments or supplements thereto, and any other relevant documents filed by HashiCorp with the SEC in connection with the Transaction at the SEC’s website (http://www.sec.gov). Copies of HashiCorp’s definitive Transaction Proxy Statement, any amendments or supplements thereto, and any other relevant documents filed by HashiCorp with the SEC in connection with the Transaction will also be available, free of charge, at HashiCorp’s investor relations website (https://ir.hashicorp.com/), or by emailing HashiCorp’s investor relations department (ir@hashicorp.com).

 

Forward-Looking Statements

This communication may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding (i) the Transaction; (ii) the expected timing of the closing of the Transaction; (iii) considerations taken into account in approving and entering into the Transaction; and (iv) expectations for HashiCorp following the closing of the Transaction. There can be no assurance that the Transaction will be consummated. Risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements, in addition to those identified above, include: (i) the possibility that the conditions to the closing of the Transaction are not satisfied, including the risk that required approvals from HashiCorp’s stockholders for the Transaction or required regulatory approvals to consummate the Transaction are not obtained, on a timely basis or at all; (ii) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to a right to terminate the Transaction, including in circumstances requiring HashiCorp to pay a termination fee; (iii) possible disruption related to the Transaction to HashiCorp’s current plans, operations and business relationships, including through the loss of customers and employees; (iv) the amount of the costs, fees, expenses and other charges incurred by HashiCorp related to the Transaction; (v) the risk that HashiCorp’s stock price may fluctuate during the pendency of the Transaction and may decline if the Transaction is not completed; (vi) the diversion of HashiCorp management’s time and attention from ongoing business operations and opportunities; (vii) the response of competitors and other market participants to the Transaction; (viii) potential litigation relating to the Transaction; (ix) uncertainty as to timing of completion of the Transaction and the ability of each party to consummate the Transaction; and (x) other risks and uncertainties detailed in the periodic reports that HashiCorp files with the SEC, including HashiCorp’s Annual Report on Form 10-K. All forward-looking statements in this communication are based on information available to HashiCorp as of the date of this communication, and, except as required by law, HashiCorp does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

Enlarge (credit: Ed Reschke via Getty)

Brace yourselves, Illinoisans: A truly shocking number of cicadas are about to live, make sweet love, and die in a tree near you. Two broods of periodical cicadas—Brood XIX on a 13-year cycle and Brood XIII on a 17-year cycle—are slated to emerge together in central Illinois this summer for the first time in over two centuries. To most humans, they’re an ephemeral spectacle and an ear-splitting nuisance, and then they’re gone. To many other Midwestern animals, plants, and microbes, they’re a rare feast, bringing new life to forests long past their death.

From Nebraska to New York, 15 broods of periodical cicadas grow underground, quietly sipping watery sap from tree roots. After 13 or 17 years (depending on the brood), countless inch-long adults dig themselves out in sync, crawling out of the ground en masse for a monthlong summer orgy. After mating, they lay eggs in forest trees and die, leaving their tree-born babies to fall to the forest floor and begin the cycle anew. Cicadas don’t fly far from their birthplace, so each brood occupies a distinct patch of the US. “They form a mosaic on the landscape,” says Chris Simon, senior research scientist in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut.

Most years, at least one of these 15 broods emerges (annual cicadas, not to be confused with their smaller periodical cousins, pop up separately every summer). Sometimes two broods emerge at the same time. It’s also not unheard of for multiple broods to coexist in the same place. “What’s unusual is that these two broods are adjacent,” says John Lill, insect ecologist at George Washington University. “Illinois is going to be ground zero. From the very top to the very bottom of the state, it’s going to be covered in cicadas.” The last time that these broods swarmed aboveground together, Thomas Jefferson was president and the city of Chicago had yet to exist.

Entomologists around the world already have their flights booked for May. “We’re like cicada groupies,” Lill says. He promises that this once-in-a-generation spectacle will be even better than April’s total solar eclipse. During 2004’s Brood X emergence, Lill remembers walking outside at midnight. “For two seconds, I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know it was raining,’ because I saw water flowing down the street. As my eyes focused, I realized it was literally just thousands of cicadas crawling across the street.”

Some cicada devotees, like author and entomologist Greg Kritsky, have already witnessed Brood XIII emerge a couple of times. But for most of their predators, a brood emergence happens once in a lifetime, and it’s always an extremely pleasant surprise. “It’s a food bonanza,” Kritsky says, “like if you walked outside and found the whole world swarming with flying Hershey’s Kisses.”

Cicadas are shockingly chill, protein-packed, and taste like high-end shrimp—easy, delicious prey. “Periodical cicadas are sitting ducks,” says Lill. They don’t bite, sting, or poison anyone, and they’re totally unbothered by being handled. Dogs, raccoons, birds, and other generalist predators will gorge themselves on this flying feast until they’re stuffed, and it barely makes a dent in the cicada population. It’s their secret weapon, Lill says: In the absence of other defense mechanisms, “they just overwhelm predators by their sheer abundance.”

Much like an unexpected free dinner will distract you from the leftovers sitting in your fridge, this summer’s cicada emergence will turn predators away from their usual prey. During the 2021 Brood X emergence, Zoe Getman-Pickering, a scientist in Lill’s research group, found that as birds swooped in on cicadas, caterpillar populations exploded. Spared from birds, caterpillars chomped on twice as many oak leaves as normal—and the chain of effects went on and on. Scientists can’t possibly study them all. “The ecosystem gets a swift kick, with this unexpected perturbation that changes a lot of things at once,” says Louie Yang, an ecologist and professor of entomology at UC Davis.

From birth to death, these insects shape the forest around them. As temperatures rise in late April, pale, red-eyed cicada nymphs begin clawing pinky-sized holes in the ground, preparing for their grand May entrance. All of these tunnels make it easier for rainwater to move through the soil, where it can then be used by plants and other dirt-inhabiting microbes. Once fully grown and aboveground, adult cicadas shed their exoskeletons, unfurl their wings, and fly off to spend their remaining four to six weeks on Earth singing (if they’re male), listening for the sexiest songs (if they’re female), and mating.

Mother cicadas use the metal-enhanced saws built into their abdomens—wood-drilling shafts layered with elements like aluminum, copper, and iron—to slice pockets into tree branches, where they’ll lay roughly 500 eggs each. Sometimes, all of these cuts cause twigs to wither or snap, killing leaves. While this could permanently damage a very young sapling, mature trees simply shed the slashed branches and carry on. “It’s like natural pruning,” Kritsky says, which keeps hearty trees strong, prevents disease, and promotes flower growth.

Once mating season winds down, so does the cicada’s life. “In late summer, everybody forgets about cicadas,” Lill says. “They all die. They all rot in the ground. And then they’re gone.” By late June, there will be millions of pounds of cicadas piling up at the base of trees, decomposing. The smell, Kritsky says, “is a sentient memory you will never forget—like rancid Limburger cheese.”

But these stinky carcasses send a massive pulse of food to scavengers in the soil. “The cicadas serve as reservoirs of nutrients,” Yang says. “When they come out, they release all this stored energy into the ecosystem,” giving their bodies back to the plants that raised them. In the short term, dead cicadas have a fertilizing effect, feeding microbes in the soil and helping plants grow larger. And as their remnants make their way into woodland ponds and streams, cicada nutrients are carried downstream, where they may strengthen aquatic ecosystems far beyond their home tree.

They may smell like bad hamburgers, but Yang says that if you’re lucky enough to host a tree full of cicadas this year, it’s best to just leave their bodies alone to decompose naturally. “They’ll be gone soon enough,” he says. If the pileup is especially obtrusive, simply sweep them out of the way and let nature do the rest.

The thought of billions of screeching insects in your backyard might make your skin crawl, but you don’t need to be a passive observer when they arrive. Researchers are clamoring for citizen scientists to send in photos of their local cicadas to help map the upcoming emergence. The Cicada Safari app, developed by Kritsky, received and verified 561,000 cicada pics during the 2021 Brood X emergence—he hopes to get even more this time around.

“This is an amazing natural phenomenon to wonder about,” Lill says, “not something to be afraid of.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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Long gone are the days of sous vide being relegated to fine-dining restaurants. The dead-accurate, low-temperature cooking is now an easy (and arguably more convenient) way to cook your finest steak or make vanilla extract or creme brulee.

Now, I’ve owned a Breville Joule sous vide machine since 2015 when it first came out. But, I’ll admit: I’m guilty of considering sous vide a weekend (or even special occasion) method. I don’t want to wait 30 minutes-plus for a water bath to preheat on a Tuesday night, you know? So when Breville released the Joule Turbo Sous Vide earlier this year, my gadget-loving ears pricked up. It’s the first time Breville’s made a hardware change to the Joule since the immersion circulator’s inception. The Turbo promises not only to be faster but that it will “make your favorite sous vide dishes in as little as half the time of conventional sous vide,” the company says. 

I put the Breville Joule Turbo to the test, evaluating its accuracy, speed, and compatible app.

The Tests

• Water Bath Test: I timed how long it took the Joule Turbo to heat a gallon of cold water (63°F) to 190°F. When the water bath was at temperature, I used an instant-read thermometer to check the temperature throughout the bath, evaluating its accuracy. I then checked the bath’s temperature every 10 minutes for an hour, to see if the temperature was stable.
• Chicken Breast Test: I timed how long it took the Joule Turbo to heat a gallon of room temperature water (72°F) to 150°F. Then, I lowered two chicken breasts in a vacuum-sealed bag into the water bath and cooked them for one hour, setting a timer on the Joule’s app. 
• Turbo Filet Mignon Test: To see how the sous vide works with its app and its app-guided recipes, I made Breville’s recipe for a filet mignon that utilizes the sous vide’s Turbo feature.
• Vessel Versatility Test: I tried affixing the Joule Turbo to various sous vide containers, including a 6-quart Cambro, Dutch oven, and stockpot.
• User Experience Tests: Throughout testing, I evaluated how easy the Joule Turbo was to set up, how well it worked with its app, and how useful the app was.

What We Learned

The Breville Joule Turbo Was Accurate and Wicked Fast

Like the Joule, the Joule Turbo is spot-on accurate. It had no problems reaching and maintaining its set temperatures. 

As far as speed, the Joule Turbo heated up a gallon of cold water in about 22 minutes and room temperature water in just under 13 minutes. While the room temperature water is on par with our other favorite immersion circulators, its cold water speed was exceptional. Compared to the Joule and Anova, the Joule Turbo was 13 and 38 minutes faster, respectively. 

To delve deeper into its speed, I reached out to Breville to see if the company could share any insights into the Joule Turbo’s construction. While the Joule Turbo and Joule have the same wattage (1100), the Turbo “has a software update and the algorithm is better able to sense what is happening and relay data for faster results,” a company representative told me. 

"When heating the water, the new Joule Turbo Sous Vide has an updated PID controller that allows it to heat the water a bit faster than the previous Joule," says Douglas Baldwin, senior mathematician and food expert at Breville. "This updated controller also helps the Turbo algorithm cook tender cuts in about half the time of the previous Joule." PID stands for Proportional Integral Derivative, which is an algorithm-driven temperature control module. (Our favorite Breville espresso machines also have this.)

The Breville+ App Was a Massive Improvement

Compared to the original Joule app, the Breville+ app has a whole lot more connectivity and functionality. The app is chock full of videos and tips, like a step-by-step guide for cleaning your immersion circulator. The recipes include videos of each step, too. All in all, the app is now a well-rounded sous vide resource instead of just a place where you go for recipes and to set your sous vide’s time and temperature. 

The Turbo Feature Worked

Another notable app feature is the Turbo in Joule Turbo. Not every Breville+ sous vide recipe is Turbo, but the ones that are denoted by a little airplane in the bottom right corner and a lightning bolt in the top right corner of the recipe. 

To see how the Turbo feature worked, I tried the app’s Turbo Filet Mignon with Peppercorn Sauce and Air-Fried Garlic Mushrooms but just made the steak portion of the recipe. The app selects the time and temperature based on your preferred steak’s doneness. To further hone in on accuracy, the app also walks you through measuring (the Turbo even includes a small ruler for this very task) and weighing the steak, then spits out the temperature and time range based on these numbers. With Turbo, you add your food while the water is cold (yes, cold!) and immediately start the timer and water bath. My filet mignon was ready in 41 minutes flat. In comparison, a standard sous vide steak takes at least an hour after the water bath is heated.

The Verdict

Pros

The Joule Turbo is ultra-powerful, incredibly accurate, and heats a cold water bath lickety-split. Its app integration is incredibly helpful and the app itself is packed with helpful videos, guided recipes, and tips. 

Cons

Like the Joule, the Joule Turbo doesn’t have an adjustable clamp, which means its vessel versatility is limited unless you invest in a Big Clamp. However, the Turbo still has a magnetic base, which means it’ll stand upright in, say, a Dutch oven. It lacks an on-board display, which may be unappealing to the app-averse.

Key Specs

• Materials: Polycarbonate; stainless steel
• Wattage: 1100
• Connectivity: Bluetooth
• Warranty: 1-year limited 
• Price at time of publish: $250

FAQs

What does a Breville Joule sous vide machine do? 

A Breville Joule sous vide machine heats a water bath up to a set temperature and holds that temperature for a specified amount of time. To cook food in a sous vide bath, you’ll want to either vacuum seal it in a bag or press as much air out of a zipper-lock bag as possible before slowly lowering it into the water bath. The water bath cooks the food gently and slowly and the bag retains moisture, so it’s nearly impossible to overcook something. 

What can you cook with a Joule sous vide?

We have plenty of sous vide recipes on this very site (like sous vide duck confit, steak, and carrots). The Breville+ app also has plenty of guided recipes. 

Can I use Ziploc bags with my sous vide?

Yes, you can use a Ziploc bag to sous vide food. You’ll want to make sure you squeeze as much air out of the bag as possible before sealing it. 

Why We’re the Experts

• To test the Joule Turbo, we tested its temperature accuracy, speed, app connectivity, and more. 
• We’ve reviewed 18 other sous vide machines, so we know a thing or two about the appliance. 
• Riddley Gemperlein-Schirm is the senior commerce editor for Serious Eats. She’s reviewed kitchen gear professionally for more than five years and has written reviews of air fryers, dinnerware sets, and more.

Editor’s note: We received a press sample of the Breville Joule Turbo, but all of our opinions are our own.