Continue process after closing terminal? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate:
Leave bash script running on remote terminal while not logged in?

Recently, I tried to unzip a 30 gig zip file on a remote system using Putty. As the long unzipping process continued, I closed Putty, assuming that the process would just continue to run on the remote machine.

When I came back later and logged back into the machine again, I realized that the process must have stopped only part way through when I closed Putty. I wasn't expecting that to happen.

My question is, how do I prevent this problem? Can I somehow fire off a process in the background? Or should just setup a one time cronjob that will run the process for me?

nohup or disown (in bash) will allow a process or job to continue in the background after the controlling shell has been killed.

You could use gnu screen to run the program, and then re-attach to the session later. Just start screen, then start the unzip process. When you want to disconnect, press Ctrl-A D. Then when you want to re-attach to the screen session use screen -r and it'll re-attach to the previous session.