How can I change a process running inside an emacs *shell* buffer to background

Question

Normally I would use C-z to accomplish this but this will cause emacs itself to go into the background.

Say I have a long program running inside the *shell* buffer of emacs (and I stupidly forgot to place the & at the end of the command), then is there a way to make that process go into the background and get back to the command prompt?

Answer 1

If you use the shell command, you can propagate C-z to it through C-cC-z.