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Industrial
Asked: 2012-01-21 08:16:54 +0800 CST

Keep a program running in terminal

  • 772

So I am well aware of nohup and suffixing commands with & to ensure that they go into the background.

However if I run a graphical application - sometimes using neither seems to do the job. So what can I prefix a program/command with to ensure that it keeps running after the terminal is closed?

gnome

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you want the application to keep running when you close the terminal window you should do:

    nohup chromium-browser &

    You need both the nohup and the &.

    • nohup means keep this process/command running after the shell closes.
    • & means put this process/command in the background so it dose not block the shell (so you can use it for something else.
    • 9

  2. when running a program in the background via the & operator it's still attached to your session and can be controlled with fg, bg, jobs and disown.

    I also had some problems with nohup but disown might be the thing you're looking for.

    When you run a program in background it has a job id:

    gedit &
[1] 5647

    That number in brackets [] is the interesting one. To detatch it from your session run disown %n with that number. For the above example:

    disown %1

    Now you can safely exit the terminal and the process will not be terminated.

    • 5

  3. For graphical applications, simply doing something like this should work (at least, it does for me)

    chromium-browser&

    For terminal applications, you should use something like screen or tmux.

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  4. Close the terminal, from which you started the graphical program, with 

    exit
    • -1