My problem is that I would like to start a lenghty process from a remote shell, without having it terminated when the shell is closed. I would like to use putty or webmin for that purpose.
I already tried with nohup command, but to no avail, because the process is started as a child from sshd, and when I close putty on the remote computer everything is gone...
And I don't want to let 2 computers run just because one is processing something...
If anyone of you knows a smart way to do so, I would be very glad...

have you tried executing the command with a trailing '&'?

I just tested it out and the program I started on a remote machine is still running.

hth,
jpbarto

I did try with the ampersand, but unfortunately this doesn't work for me...
The process is sended to the background, but if I type exit in the shell, then it says: "there are stopped jobs" and shows me that it has stopped the job...
Nohup works better, putty doesn't stop the process then, but it is stopped when the ssh daemon closes the connection...
I will try using rlogin, and report here...

I can't get rlogin to work, but I would anyways rather use SSH, because of the better security...
Maybe I should add that the remote computer is running WinXP here at work...
And I'm using Putty client for windows.

so you ssh from winxp to a *nix box?

I don't know... but here's the experiment I tried between two slack9 boxes.

ssh into remote slack9 box,
write the following c-code:

int main (){
FILE * fp;
int i = 1;

fp = fopen ("test.output", "w");

while (i++){
fprintf (fp, "i is now %d\n", i);
fflush (fp);
sleep (10);
}

fclose (fp);

return i;
}

compiled it, ran it with '&' and then typed exit.

closed the xterm and walked over to remote machine... typed 'cat test.output'.

plus a ps revealed that the little thing was still running.

what linux are you ssh'ing into? Is this behavior perhaps configurable through sshd's config files?

Thank you all for your efforts and your help!
I just tried with the nohup option and the ampersand in the end again, and ran mencoder with it (which is the application I want to run), and it worked...
I was alway using "lynx www.google.com" before (out of a lack of fantasy) and that didn't survive the termination of the shell...
But mencoder does, and that's all I need...
I'm running debian woody...
Funny that lynx didn't stay alive and mencoder does, but that's maybe because it isn't able to output to nohup.out...

Thanks again for all your help!