hello, i have a question.

is it possible to run a program completely in background without a user seeing anything at all?

lets say i have a program:

[HTML]int main() {
FILE *yay;

yay = fopen("file","w");
while(1) {
printf("woooo!"); //prints to STDOUT
fprintf(yay, "woooo!"); //prints to file
}
return 0;
}[/HTML]

now i want to run this program compiled from console without seeing anything (no stdout). what i want it to do is to print to file without seeing "woooo!" in my console.

i tried something with fork() and close(1) but it didnt work as i expected (in fact it didnt work at all).

so what i am looking for is a command like "program &" but which does not show stdout or stderr of the process.

is there a shell command or a C way to do this?

You could start it something like this:
command > /dev/null 2>&1 &
(Or direct output to wherever you want)

thanks, that's exacly what i was looking for.

one more thing, can u please explain the bold part? i assume it means to redirect stderr to stdout, which is then redirected to /dev/null. correct me if im wrong.

thanks

You are absolutely correct