I am using Fedora Core 5 with GNOME desktop. I start up a terminal and start a command ( in this case gnome-system-monitor ). When I close the terminal, the system monitor closes along with it.

A quick Google search along the lines of 'process closes with terminal' yielded what I thought would be the solution: backgrounding the process.

So I started the system monitor as below in the terminal.

After pressing 'Enter' I was given the prompt back so it had successfully backgrounded the task ( as far as I aware ).

Even after this, closing the terminal causes gnome-system-monitor to close also and I am unable to find any more methods. I am aware I can make a desktop shortcut to do this but the system monitor is not the only thing I wish to run from the terminal ( and then close it ).

Has anyone else come across this problem and if so, what solution/s are there available? Reference material is, of course, welcomed.

Hi,

This behaviour is correct.

Every thing started from a terminal is a child from that terminal. Closing the terminal will also kill children.

The nohup command can be used to get around this.

nohup gnome-system-monitor & should do the trick.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the quick response.

It works excellent, thank you muchly.
Read up the command and now I understand what is happening. Just for reference ( in case anyone wants to know ) it seems when a parent is killed a SIGHUP ( hangup signal ) is sent to the children of that process. 'nohup' causes the created process to ignore this signal.

Again, many thanks.

By the way, disown lets you say bash or zsh not to send SIGHUP to process. What's the benefit? You can do it any moment after bg-ing job, not before running.

Thanks for your input, that will be very useful no doubt.