What's the difference between nohup and ampersand

Solution 1:

nohup catches the hangup signal (see man 7 signal) while the ampersand doesn't (except the shell is confgured that way or doesn't send SIGHUP at all).

Normally, when running a command using & and exiting the shell afterwards, the shell will terminate the sub-command with the hangup signal (kill -SIGHUP <pid>). This can be prevented using nohup, as it catches the signal and ignores it so that it never reaches the actual application.

In case you're using bash, you can use the command shopt | grep hupon to find out whether your shell sends SIGHUP to its child processes or not. If it is off, processes won't be terminated, as it seems to be the case for you. More information on how bash terminates applications can be found here.

There are cases where nohup does not work, for example when the process you start reconnects the SIGHUP signal, as it is the case here.

Solution 2:

myprocess.out & would run the process in background using a subshell. If the current shell is terminated (say by logout), all subshells are also terminated so the background process would also be terminated. The nohup command ignores the HUP signal and thus even if the current shell is terminated, the subshell and myprocess.out would continue to run in the background. Another difference is that & alone doesn't redirect the stdout/stderr so if there are any output or error, those are displayed on the terminal. nohup on the other hand redirect the stdout/stderr to nohup.out or $HOME/nohup.out.