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

Check out the "nohup" program.


I would recommend using GNU Screen. It allows you to disconnect from the server while all of your processes continue to run. I don't know how I lived without it before I knew it existed.


When the session is closed the process receives the SIGHUP signal which it is apparently not catching. You can use the nohup command when launching the process or the bash built-in command disown -h after starting the process to prevent this from happening:

> help disown
disown: disown [-h] [-ar] [jobspec ...]
     By default, removes each JOBSPEC argument from the table of active jobs.
    If the -h option is given, the job is not removed from the table, but is
    marked so that SIGHUP is not sent to the job if the shell receives a
    SIGHUP.  The -a option, when JOBSPEC is not supplied, means to remove all
    jobs from the job table; the -r option means to remove only running jobs.

daemonize? nohup? SCREEN? (tmux ftw, screen is junk ;-)

Just do what every other app has done since the beginning -- double fork.

# ((exec sleep 30)&)
# grep PPid /proc/`pgrep sleep`/status
PPid:   1
# jobs
# disown
bash: disown: current: no such job

Bang! Done :-) I've used this countless times on all types of apps and many old machines. You can combine with redirects and whatnot to open a private channel between you and the process.

Create as coproc.sh:

#!/bin/bash

IFS=

run_in_coproc () {
    echo "coproc[$1] -> main"
    read -r; echo $REPLY
}

# dynamic-coprocess-generator. nice.
_coproc () {
    local i o e n=${1//[^A-Za-z0-9_]}; shift
    exec {i}<> <(:) {o}<> >(:) {e}<> >(:)
. /dev/stdin <<COPROC "${@}"
    (("\$@")&) <&$i >&$o 2>&$e
    $n=( $o $i $e )
COPROC
}

# pi-rads-of-awesome?
for x in {0..5}; do
    _coproc COPROC$x run_in_coproc $x
    declare -p COPROC$x
done

for x in COPROC{0..5}; do
. /dev/stdin <<RUN
    read -r -u \${$x[0]}; echo \$REPLY
    echo "$x <- main" >&\${$x[1]}
    read -r -u \${$x[0]}; echo \$REPLY
RUN
done

and then

# ./coproc.sh 
declare -a COPROC0='([0]="21" [1]="16" [2]="23")'
declare -a COPROC1='([0]="24" [1]="19" [2]="26")'
declare -a COPROC2='([0]="27" [1]="22" [2]="29")'
declare -a COPROC3='([0]="30" [1]="25" [2]="32")'
declare -a COPROC4='([0]="33" [1]="28" [2]="35")'
declare -a COPROC5='([0]="36" [1]="31" [2]="38")'
coproc[0] -> main
COPROC0 <- main
coproc[1] -> main
COPROC1 <- main
coproc[2] -> main
COPROC2 <- main
coproc[3] -> main
COPROC3 <- main
coproc[4] -> main
COPROC4 <- main
coproc[5] -> main
COPROC5 <- main

And there you go, spawn whatever. the <(:) opens an anonymous pipe via process substitution, which dies, but the pipe sticks around because you have a handle to it. I usually do a sleep 1 instead of : because its slightly racy, and I'd get a "file busy" error -- never happens if a real command is ran (eg, command true)

"heredoc sourcing":

. /dev/stdin <<EOF
[...]
EOF

This works on every single shell I've ever tried, including busybox/etc (initramfs). I've never seen it done before, I independently discovered it while prodding, who knew source could accept args? But it often serves as a much more manageable form of eval, if there is such a thing.


nohup blah &

Substitute your process name for blah!