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I'm trying to run a minecraft server on linux. Running the server starts an important interactive session. I can run the server in the background by appending & at the end of the command and log off the server. But then I don't know how to get back to that interactive session when I log back in.

I know about screen, but it seems like there should be a better way of running processes in the background and being able to go into them later.

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@SvenW if you make that comment into a answer I'll credit you – at. Nov 27 '12 at 16:33

migrated from serverfault.com Nov 20 '12 at 12:26

2 Answers

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screen (or tmux) is the best option for this and written for exactly this purpose.

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Or dtach. (See questions tagged with dtach). – manatwork Nov 27 '12 at 16:50
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This is the proper way to do it:

  • Start the process without the &
  • Use Ctrl-Z to suspend the process
  • Execute on that command line the process bg. This will take your process to the background as if you had it executed using the &.
  • At any point in time you can bring your process to the foreground by using fg
  • Also, you can get a list of currently executing processes by executing jobs
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Sounds perfect, can I log out of the ssh session while a process is bg'ed and then log back in and fg into it? – at. Nov 25 '12 at 9:19
no, you can't. To achieve that, as already stated by SvenW, you should use screen or tmux. – Gonzalo Alvarez Nov 27 '12 at 10:54

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