Running bash commands in the background properly

Running bash commands in the background properly(felixmilea.com)

32 points by felixmc 11 years ago | 9 comments

Too 11 years ago |

I found 'screen' to be pretty handy for running scripts in the background. Then you can also reattach later to look at stdout as it's running.

chinpokomon 11 years ago | |

Screen or tmux. I tend to prefer tmux, but the both have this ability. I'm actuality surprised that there isn't a more elegant choice other than redirecting stdout and stderr to /dev/null where you can fork jobs to a background and reattach later to see the tty. Is there a shell that has a job queue that can be accessed from any number of shells?

ordinary 11 years ago | | |

There's this for attaching a running program to your terminal when it is not started in screen: https://github.com/nelhage/reptyr

xyzzy_plugh 11 years ago |

Understanding whether background jobs get killed (via SIGHUP) or orphaned is not obvious without reading about the huponexit shopt. I've found some recent distros to not enable huponexit by default for login shells, and so this isn't always an issue.

More importantly, understanding how your jobs behave when your SSH session is killed can be a huge timesaver.

pjbrunet 11 years ago |

The random shell output from "background" apps never bothered me that much ;-) Crunchbang you can just press F2 and get auto-complete and launch commands with no shell output. Ubuntu has something similar. If you have terminator, just split the pane if you need a fresh one, or drag the terminal to another workspace and it's out of the way. Also tmux has ^bd to "detach" I think.

0942v8653 11 years ago |

Wouldn't it be better to simply do

    "$@" "${FD[@]" &

And also remember to

    alias ds='ds '

to enable alias expansion.

felixmc 11 years ago | |

would you mind explaining why that might be better?

0942v8653 11 years ago | | |

It avoids a call to eval, which is always good. It's also a bit simpler.

plicense 11 years ago |

Added to /bin/sh