When I'm in an X terminal window and I envoke mplayer or gkrellm or any other program that I may want running in the background it ties up the terminal window I launched it from.

I realize I can use the 'Run' menu option in REDHAT 9.0 to set off a program and that I can also add a panel 'launcher' control that does the same thing. But I was wondering if there was any option for envoking a program *specifically* in the terminal window, having it lauch and continue to run but *immediately* get back my prompt in the terminal window I launched it from ... in programming I believe this is called an 'out of process' call where the calling program or shell does not have to wait for the envoked command or application to terminate before it continues on with its next task or in this case returns control to the user.

Any help on this would be appreciated. Having a little trouble launching gkrellm when I log in and it's ticking me off. When I add the command to lauch it (/sbin/gkrellm) to the end of ~/.bash_profile it launches gkrellm but sits there without starting anything else until I close gkrellm then it loads my panels, icons and background theme etc ... I also tried adding it to the end of /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc but the same thing occurs.

So my question is really 2 fold. Any takers?

I'm running redhat 9.0 and kernel 2.4.20-18.9

I spent all morning on this and am still researching it in REDHAT's pdf docs ... so far to no avail.

use a bash script to execute the command you want that way you should get your command prombt back

what i like to do is create a link to application (right click menu in KDE at least) and it allows you to execute a command with options and all just like from the command line and then just click once on it to open it without a terminal or anything

Nakkaya, could I trouble you for a code example?

I created a file with a single command in it, that command is:

gkrellm

saved it and chmodded it to give all execute then I set it off via command line and it does fire gkrellm but does not give me back the command line prompt until I shut gkrellm down.

Was this what you were suggesting or did I implement this incorrectly?

Riley, thanks for the suggestion. I may have to do that until I can figure out the out of process thing .... It would be smooth if I could get it to fire at login since I will always want it online....

Any other advice would be most welcome.

Try doing:The "&" means "run this program in the background", so you should get the prompt back.

HAHA! That did it! An ampersand preceeded by a space ... never would have figured.

Thanks to you all! The devil is indeed in the details.