nohup Execute Commands After You Exit From a Shell Prompt

Most of the time you login into remote server via ssh. If you start a shell script or command and you exit (abort remote connection), the process / command will get killed. Sometime job or command takes a long time. If you are not sure when the job will finish, then it is better to leave job running in background. However, if you logout the system, the job will be stopped. What do you do?

nohup command

Answer is simple, use nohup utility which allows to run command./process or shell script that can continue running in the background after you log out from a shell:

nohup Syntax:

nohup command-name &

Where,

• command-name : is name of shell script or command name. You can pass argument to command or a shell script.
• & : nohup does not automatically put the command it runs in the background; you must do that explicitly, by ending the command line with an & symbol.

nohup command examples

1) Login to remote server
$ ssh user@remote.server.com
2) Execute script called pullftp.sh
# nohup pullftp.sh &
Type exit or press CTRL + D exit from remote server.
# exit
3) Find all programs and scripts with setuid bit set on, enter:
# nohup find / -xdev -type f -perm +u=s -print > out.txt &
Type exit or press CTRL + D exit from remote server.
# exit
Please note that nohup does not change the scheduling priority of COMMAND; use nice for that:
# nohup nice -n -5 ls / > out.txt &
As you can see nohup keep processes running after you exit from a shell. Read man page of nohup and nice command for more information. Please note that nohup is almost available on Solaris/BSD/Linux/UNIX variant.

Update:
# 1: As pointed out by Jason you can use at command to queue a job for later execution. For example, you can run pullftp.sh script to queue (one minute) later execution
$ echo "pullftp.sh" | at now + 1 minute
# 2: You can also use screen command for same. Brock pointed out disown shell internal command for same purpose. Here is how you can try it out:
$ pullftp.sh &
$ disown -h
$ exit
According to bash man page:

By default, removes each JOBSPEC argument from the table of active jobs. If the -h option is given, the job is not removed from the table, but is marked so that SIGHUP is not sent to the job if the shell receives a SIGHUP. The -a option, when JOBSPEC is not supplied, means to remove all jobs from the job table; the -r option means to remove only running jobs.

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