Question

I have written a script that relies on other server responses (uses wget to pull data), and I want it to always be run in the background unquestionably. I know one solution is to just write a wrapper script that will call my script with an & appended, but I want to avoid that clutter.

Is there a way for a bash (or zsh) script to determine if it was called with say ./foo.sh &, and if not, exit and re-launch itself as such?

Answer 1

I do not know, how to do this, but you may set variable in parent script and check for it in child:

if [[ -z "$_BACKGROUNDED" ]] ; then
    _BACKGROUNDED=1 exec "$0" "$@" & exit
fi
# Put code here

Works both in bash and zsh.