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24

What is the difference between

$ nohup foo

and

$ foo &

and

$ foo &
$ disown
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6  
Wait, you can disown without specifying a PID ? Great! – ripper234 Nov 12 '10 at 11:20
2  
There is also foo &! which should be equal to disowning it right from the start. – user4514 Nov 18 '12 at 19:02

1 Answer

up vote 43 down vote accepted

Using & causes the program to run in the background, so you'll get a new shell prompt instead of blocking until the program ends. nohup and disown are largely unrelated; they suppress SIGHUP (hangup) signals so the program isn't automatically killed when the controlling terminal is closed. nohup does this when the job first begins. If you don't nohup a job when it begins, you can use disown to modify a running job; with no arguments it modifies the current job, which is the one that was just backgrounded

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5  
Minor difference between nohup and disown: the disown command will remove it from your jobs list; nohup will not. – Shawn J. Goff Nov 9 '10 at 16:41
50  
nohup and disown both can be said to suppress SIGHUP, but in different ways. nohup makes the program ignore the signal initially (the program may change this). nohup also tries to arrange for the program not to have a controlling terminal, so that it won't be sent SIGHUP by the kernel when the terminal is closed. disown is purely internal to the shell; it causes the shell not to send SIGHUP when it terminates. – Gilles Nov 9 '10 at 18:26
9  
@Gilles, your comment is worth an answer of itself. – lesmana Nov 10 '10 at 18:30

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