I run a lot of programs in Ubuntu from the terminal, but I would like to be able to continue using the terminal after I have a program open. How can I put the programs in the background so that I don't have to open another window?
asked Dec 2, 2012 at 1:22
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5 Answers
There are different ways to run a terminal program and continue using the terminal:
- You can open another terminal tab (right-click, then select "Open New Tab").
- You can append
&to the command you run. Be aware that you will not see text output to the terminal, such as error messages. - You can type Ctrl-Z and then run
bg. This has the same effect as runningcommand & - You can run
nohup command &and then press enter. (Thanks to ccpizza, see comments below.)
However, pressing Alt-F2 and then running your command from the GUI is usually considered best practice - there is no terminal at all!
Note that when using & (not nohup), closing the terminal will still terminate the application unless you run disown afterwards.
EDIT: It looks like using nohup will sometimes leave little droppings in your home folder. What would normally have been logged to the terminal is apparently saved to a file in ~/.
~~
A simple way to run a program in the background is program-name & disown, which will drop you to a terminal which can be closed without killing the process.
answered Dec 2, 2012 at 1:38
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5To prevent killing the child process after the terminal is closed you can start your app as
nohup firefox&.– ccpizzaCommented Dec 3, 2012 at 22:25 -
Cool! I didn't know that (but upon experimentation, the terminal is still "blocked")! Commented Dec 3, 2012 at 23:35
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it is not 'blocked', it only 'looks' blocked, if you type enter once you will get a prompt.– ccpizzaCommented Dec 4, 2012 at 21:07
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nohup <command> &works perfectly, especially for remote servers where you may disconnect but want the command to keep running forever, or until it finishes. Commented May 28, 2020 at 20:25
You can use setsid to run program in a new session with addition to &>/dev/null so you will not receive any log messages.
So it would be like
setsid program-name &>/dev/null
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1Cool. It must keep process running when user logout and current session closed. Commented Mar 7, 2019 at 15:40
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Hey can you also let us know how to stop the process if need to be stop Commented May 2 at 7:12
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2This works only until you close the terminal window, once you close the window the program will terminate Commented Jul 6, 2018 at 1:20
You can run it in a virtual terminal like tmux (or screen but I heard it's not maintained anymore)
# This ataches your terminal to a virtual terminal
tmux
run_your_command
# This detaches your virtual terminal (previous command can be running)
CTRL-b d
run_other_commands # on your terminal
# re-attach the virtual terminal to see the status of run_your_command
tmux a
tmux can do a lot more, like :
- move your virtual terminal to another terminal
- share the virtual terminal in several terminals (other users can see what your doing ;-) )
- split the "screen" to have several terminals.
- ...
https://www.hamvocke.com/blog/a-quick-and-easy-guide-to-tmux/
Using screen command, you can open multiple terminal sessions using a single window
apt-get install screen (On Debian based Systems)
yum install screen (On RedHat based Systems)
screen (start new screen)
[Your command]
Ctrl+A d to leave screen
... and so on
