Mouse cursor turned into a "thick plus", cannot click but mouse can move

import is the command to create a screenshot, provided by the ImageMagick tool suite.

When you run

import something

as shell command, it will show you a crosshair cursor to select a rectangular area of the screen for capturing, and then save that as file something.

Now you pressed Ctrl+Z, which is the shortcut for freezing a process and returning to the command prompt in Bash. So import is still "running" (not exactly - it's frozen, but still existing) and didn't get a chance to exit or return control over the mouse and screen.

You have to continue the import process by e.g. thawing it and getting it back to the foreground of the shell using the fg Bash command. It will probably exit immediately then, otherwise you can terminate it with Ctrl+C.

Alternatively, you could also just kill the process by closing the parent terminal window/Bash session or using a command like killall -KILL import.


Most of the time this problem occurs because of the conflict in python scripts import with Linux "import" command, I encountered this problem several times, and I used to adopt an easy solution.

type "bg" on your terminal
then "Cnt + c"