Question

I have a BASH script which runs other commands and I would like to keep them running in case the main script stops. I tried to run those commands with & but it didn’t help. Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

This is normal: the shell’s job control mechanism terminates its jobs when it exits.

There are at least two solutions:

• use disown after you have launched a job;
• use at to schedule your job at a later time;
• or use the nohup command.

Now, there is the question of what you want to do with the output of the command you launch in the background:

• with disown, you lose it;
• with at, stdout and stderr are sent to you by mail (but then you can redirect stdout/stderr if you want);
• with nohup, you define the output file yourself.