Running program from terminal with & does nothing, program stops

DittoAlex · 10-04-2007, 09:32 PM

Sometimes (it may or may not happen, it goes through phases of cooperation), when I start a program with an ampersand afterwards, to background it, nothing happens. The next time I press the return key, I get a new terminal input and am also told the previous job stopped. I can then fg or bg it and it will draw and run properly.

This does not happen with only one program, it happens with many of them, though they all seem to be X-based. Vlc, openoffice, etc...

Code:

$ vlc file &
[1] 25189
$

[1]+  Stopped                 vlc file
$ fg
vlc file
VLC media player 0.8.6a Janus

My terminal of choice is Yakuake in Gnome, Debian 4.0r1.

jlliagre · 10-05-2007, 01:35 AM

My guess would be your program is waiting for one of stdin, stdout or stderr (or all of them) to be available.

Try

Code:

vlc file </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1 &