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How do I run a program in the background of a shell, with the ability to close the shell while leaving the program running? Lets say my UI is having problems or for some reason, I need to boot up a program from the terminal window, say, nm-applet:

nm-applet

When it's started, it occupies the foreground of the terminal window.

Is there any simple way to run the program in the background without needing to leave the terminal open or have it occupy the whole terminal?

On that note, I did find a way to run programs from the terminal and have it allow for other inputs, by appending an ampersand (&) to the command as such:

nm-applet &

But this isn't much use as any processes started in the terminal are killed once the terminal is closed.                                                                        

TheMaskedCucumber
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OVERTONE
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10 Answers10

227

I've recently come to like setsid. It starts off looking like you're just running something from the terminal but you can disconnect (close the terminal) and it just keeps going.

This is because the command actually forks out and while the input comes through to the current terminal, it's owned by a completely different parent (that remains alive after you close the terminal).

An example:

setsid gnome-calculator

I'm also quite partial to disown which can be used to separate a process from the current tree. You use it in conjunction with the backgrounding ampersand:

gnome-calculator & disown

I also just learnt about spawning subshells with parenthesis. This simple method works:

(gnome-calculator &)

And of course there's nohup as you mentioned. I'm not wild about nohup because it has a tendency to write to ~/nohup.out without me asking it to. If you rely on that, it might be for you.

nohup gnome-calculator

And for the longer-term processes, there are things like screen and other virtual terminal-muxers that keep sessions alive between connections. These probably don't really apply to you because you just want temporary access to the terminal output, but if you wanted to go back some time later and view the latest terminal activity, screen would probably be your best choice.

The internet is full of screen tutorials but here's a simple quick-start:

Kęstutis
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Oli
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78

Here's the two ways I'd go with. Firstly, not running it from a terminal; hit Alt+F2 to open the run dialog, and run it from there (without &).

From a terminal, run

nm-applet &

But do NOT close the terminal yourself. That is, do not hit the X-button to close, and do not use File -> Exit from its menubar. If you close the terminal that way, it will send a HUP (Hang UP) signal to the bash running within, which in turn will send the HUP signal to all its children (which is why nohup works in this case).

Instead, exit the shell by running exit or hitting Ctrl+D. bash will then disown its children, then exit, leaving the background processes still running. And when bash exits, the terminal has lost its child process, so it will close too.

Doing it all at once:

nm-applet & exit
geirha
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20

As you pointed out, you can run 

nohup nm-applet &

to ignore the end signal when closing the terminal. No problem with that.

desgua
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19

One thing that many other answers are missing is how to detach a running process that currently blocks the shell. In most terminals and shells, Ctrl+Z will halt the running process and bring you back to an input prompt. Then, you can issue

bg

to send the running process into the background. Issue

fg

instead to put the running process back into the foreground.

EDIT: More detail in this answer I discovered later.

Community
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krlmlr
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10

Use （exec PROGRAM &> /dev/null & ） to allow PID of subshell to be taken over by PROGRAM. I've tested this approach multiple times with several different programs. Closing the original terminal has no affect on the newly-spawned program

Small demo:

$ # this is before running
$ (exec firefox &> /dev/null &)
$ # and look, we still in side the terminal and can continue working
Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
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2

The modern and easy to use approach that allows managing multiple processes and has a nice terminal UI is hapless utility.

Install with pip install hapless (or python3 -m pip install hapless) and just run

$ hap run my-command  # e.g. hap run python my_long_running_script.py
$ hap status  # check all the launched processes

See docs for more info.

ui

NOTE: I'm the author of this package.

Most Wanted
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2

I can recommend the byobu terminal. You can easily detach your process by pressing the F6 key.

speter
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2

Although there are good answers above, I would like to give my 2 cents on how I use MATLAB in background.

sudo -b matlab

The -b tag of sudo can run applications in background. You can also close the terminal after executing this command.

Probably, unrelated but there is wonderful website that you can use to explain shell commands. http://explainshell.com/explain/8/sudo

user3342981
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0

In case KDE is used, you can also use kstart, which will start your program detached from the terminal. It also makes sure that the KDE environment is correctly setup for the command. (See kstart.cpp source code for reference. As you see from there, it uses KProcess::startDetached, and KProcess is derived from QProcess, and startDetached starts a new process, and detaches from it.)

Similar is also kde-open or xdg-open or gnome-open.

Albert
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0

I dont know its the right way but i just start another session while leaving the previous one allone. For example i ran a simple web server on my raspberry. the web.py one. then i start a new session while leaving it alone. thats it. it also is wuite useful since you are still updated even though you are workin on the other session.

leo
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