Background from terminal emulator to Openbox session

Question

Is there any way to run a command from a terminal emulator in Openbox, so that Openbox would own the process, rather than the terminal?

Then I could launch a program from a terminal emulator that would stay running when I closed the terminal emulator, but would exit when X11 exits?

Answer 1

Yes, just run the command in the background and exit the terminal emulator gracefully (use either Ctrl+D or exit):

command &

For example, firefox &.

In the BASH shell, the ampersand (&) means "run this command as a backround process". If you close the terminal from which you launched it using either exit or Ctrl+D, the program will keep running. If you close the terminal by clicking on it's windows "X" it will also kill the process.

To bring a process back to the foreground (from the same terminal or tty) run fg. To send a process launched normally to the background, type Ctrl+Z in the terminal you launched it from.

Other ways to run processes in a way that is independent of the terminal emulator that launched them are the following (always using firefox as an example):

1. nohup. From the nohup manpage:

   nohup - run a command immune to hangups, with output to a non-tty

   If standard input is a terminal, redirect it from /dev/null. If standard output is a terminal, append output to nohup.out' if possible,$HOME/nohup.out' otherwise. If standard error is a terminal, redirect it to standard output. To save output to FILE, use `nohup COMMAND > FILE'.

   Example:

   nohup firefox
   

2. at, from the at manpage:

   at, batch, atq, atrm - queue, examine or delete jobs for later execution

   at executes commands at a specified time.

   The usage is slightly more complex, you need to have a text file that contains the command(s) you want to run, one per line. Then you launch at, telling it to execute at a specific time:

   echo "firefox" > command.txt
   at 14:56 < command.txt
   

   The example above tells at to launch the commands listed in the file command.txt at 14:56 PM.

NOTE: Using either at or nohup, the process launched will keep running after exiting X.