How to prevent a background process from being stopped after closing SSH client in Linux

Question

I\'m working on a Linux machine through SSH (Putty). I need to leave a process running during the night, so I thought I could do that by starting the process in background (

Answer 1

As others have noted, to run a process in the background so that you can disconnect from your SSH session, you need to have the background process properly disassociate itself from its controlling terminal - which is the pseudo-tty that the SSH session uses.

You can find information about daemonizing processes in books such as Stevens' "Advanced Network Program, Vol 1, 3rd Edn" or Rochkind's "Advanced Unix Programming".

I recently (in the last couple of years) had to deal with a recalcitrant program that did not daemonize itself properly. I ended up dealing with that by creating a generic daemonizing program - similar to nohup but with more controls available.

Usage: daemonize [-abchptxV][-d dir][-e err][-i in][-o out][-s sigs][-k fds][-m umask] -- command [args...]
  -V          print version and exit
  -a          output files in append mode (O_APPEND)
  -b          both output and error go to output file
  -c          create output files (O_CREAT)
  -d dir      change to given directory
  -e file     error file (standard error - /dev/null)
  -h          print help and exit
  -i file     input file (standard input - /dev/null)
  -k fd-list  keep file descriptors listed open
  -m umask    set umask (octal)
  -o file     output file (standard output - /dev/null)
  -s sig-list ignore signal numbers
  -t          truncate output files (O_TRUNC)
  -p          print daemon PID on original stdout
  -x          output files must be new (O_EXCL)

The double-dash is optional on systems not using the GNU getopt() function; it is necessary (or you have to specify POSIXLY_CORRECT in the environment) on Linux etc. Since double-dash works everywhere, it is best to use it.

You can still contact me (firstname dot lastname at gmail dot com) if you want the source for daemonize.

However, the code is now (finally) available on GitHub in my SOQ (Stack Overflow Questions) repository as file daemonize-1.10.tgz in the packages sub-directory.