The options -fg/-bg are handled by X Toolkit. xterm can infer some things to improve the behavior (and this has been addressed in more than one way). The original problem here appears to be from a conflicting user-specified resource (which won't be fixed by any improvements to -fg/-bg handling).
-- Thomas E. Dickey <dic...@invisible-island.net> http://invisible-island.net ftp://invisible-island.net
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