How to create a bash script to automatically disown a process.

jon_k · 06-18-2005, 05:58 AM

How can I create a bash script that will basically execute command&

And then automatically disown the process so it becomes seperate from under bash?

Is it possible?

druuna · 06-18-2005, 06:05 AM

Hi,

I can be wrong, but I think you are looking for the nohup command.

nohup <command> will run a command immune to hangups, with output to a non-tty.

Hope this helps.

dr_zayus69 · 06-18-2005, 07:45 AM

just to make sure i understand is say you wanted to start firefox from the terminal by doing

firefox &

so that you don't get the output to the terminal and still have controll of the shell?

That would be a pretty easy script it would look like this

#!/bin/sh

#Start program with &
firefox &

exit 0

lets say you named that script webbrowswer just make sure the script is in a directory in your PATH variable (do echo $PATH to be sure) or make a link to your script in one then you could just type webbrowser and it would start up firefox like you typed firefox &. So just change firefox to whatever program you want to start up. I have no experience with nohup so druuna's method would probably work as well. If you still wanted a script with his method just change firefox & in mine to nohup firefox (or whatever program you end up using) hope this helps.

jon_k · 06-18-2005, 09:19 PM

Basically what I wanted this script for is so I could place this script in /usr/bin and use it to start a Windows program I use frequently. E.G. wine /path/to/exe

dr_zayus69: Tried your way since I've seen it done in init scripts, and it works exactly. Starts up the command I want, and then gives me my shell prompt back, and I can exit the shell too without the process dieing with it.

Here's thie script I wrote resulting from your advice, and it works.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

/home/jon_k/cxoffice/bin/wine /home/jon_k/.palace/palace32_original.exe &
exit 0

----------
Drunna's way works, and loads the program but it doesn't seem to give me control of my shell while the programs running. It seems to just log the output of stdout to nohup.out.

E.G.

Code:

jon_k@2[~]$ nohup xchat
nohup: appending output to `nohup.out'
at this point nothing else happens, until I hit ctrl-c or quit xchat

dr_zayus69 · 06-19-2005, 05:42 AM

did you make a link to the script or put it in /usr/bin so you can just type it in and start it? If you want to do it via making a symbolic link i can help you out with that as well.

druuna · 06-19-2005, 05:53 AM

Hi,

@jon_k:

I thought (like I said before, I could be wrong

) that you wanted to detach the running script. The nohup option will not give you any control after the script is started (but you noticed that already).

Nohup is mostly used when you don't want/need/have a terminal after you start the script/program and cannot be used with interactive programs (like firefox, xchat etc).

Hope this clears things up a bit.