Korn Shell Programming by Example

nohup Explained

The command nohup is used to ensure that a process will run even if it loses contact with the terminal in which it is attached.

The syntax is simple:

/usr/bin/nohup command

Showing how the nohup command works requires the use of two terminals. In the first terminal, a simple sleep command is executed with nohup:

$ nohup sleep 10000
nohup: appending output to `nohup.out'

You might recall that the problem with a process existing in the background is that it gets into trouble when it needs to access the display. To get around this, nohup appends all output to a file in the current directory called nohup.out. This is the meaning of the line following the nohup command in the previous example.

The sleep command is a way of having ...