I am trying to wirte a clock and run it in the background, but when I try to use the '&' to run the shell at the background, it gets suspended and return a message "<tty output>".

Can I use the tput command to interupt the currsor position of the shell by a program running in the background?

Here is my code:
-------
#!/bin/csh/

set col = `tput cols`
@ col = $col - 15
while (1)
tput sc
tput rev
tput cup 0 $col
echo `date '+TIME: %H:%M:%S'`
tput rmso
tput rc
sleep 1
end

I'm not an expert in this area, but the act of placing a job in the background disconects it from the terminal. Therefore, tput has no place to write to.

I think you're not gong to be able to write a clock program in shell. I think you'll have to write a "C" program.