Most of us used to login to a server using an SSH client. Situations happen like this that a process will take a long time to be finished. System software upgrade is an example of this situation. If we start a command and exit the ssh the process will be stopped immediately. You are probably thinking of running the command on background. But even so, exiting from SSH will terminate the execution. So, is there any solution that the command stays running while we quit the SSH client!

###Meet the nohup command

The answer is obvious, use nohup command line-utility which allows us to run commands or shell script that can continue running in the background after we log out from a shell.

Use it like:

$ nohup command-goes-here args &

To view active commands:

$ jobs -l

nohup doesn’t change the scheduling priority of the commands. To change the priority we can use nice command with it.

$ nohup nice -n -5 command-here args &

###Queue the command

We can schedule the command for later execution on the server. For example, we can run my-shell-script.sh script to queue (one minute) later execution:

$ echo "my-shell-script.sh" | at now + 1 minute

###Learn to disown the shell We can also use screen command for same purpose. The disown shell internal command can do it for us. Here is how you can try it out:

$ pullftp.sh &
$ disown -h
$ exit

Now we can exit from the SSH. The command will be running on the server.