Dear Folks,

I wanted to run a particular shell program in a background,
how do we do that...


i have another query also, that is how to find a creation date of the file..

Thanks in advance..


Thanks and Regards,
V.Anand,
Bangalore.

but an & at the end of the command to run it in background

like
./myscript&

this will keep your terminal free and command will keep running in background

I am not sure about the file creation date, may be someone else can help

This is not possible: unix stores only time of last access, time of last modification and time of last inode change

Note that for most commands, if you run them in the background using the & after the command, they will terminate when the terminal is closed. This is because the operating system sends the SIGHUP (hang up) signal to background jobs when a terminal closes, and mos programs terminate on receipt of this signal.

You can prevent the signal from getting to the program by starting it like this:
The nohup stands for "no hangup", referring to the signal mentioned above.

As for the time, unix-like filesystems do not store the creation time for files. You have three time stamps to choose from:

1. atime - the time the file was last accessed (e.g. read)
2. mtime - the time the file contents were last modified (e.g. appended to)
3. ctime - time of last change to the file contents or the file meta-data (e.g. permissions change).

Probably the one you want is the mtime. You can get this for a specific file using the stat command, like this:
Of using the -l option to ls will also display the mtime, although the format changes more, so if you are trying to use it in a script, the stat method is probably more suitable.

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