How to Keep Program Running in Background in Ash Shell

How to run a command in the background and get no output?

Use nohup if your background job takes a long time to finish or you just use SecureCRT or something like it login the server.

Redirect the stdout and stderr to /dev/null to ignore the output.

nohup /path/to/your/script.sh > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Waiting for background processes to finish before exiting script

If you want to wait for jobs to finish, use wait. This will make the shell wait until all background jobs complete. However, if any of your jobs daemonize themselves, they are no longer children of the shell and wait will have no effect (as far as the shell is concerned, the child is already done. Indeed, when a process daemonizes itself, it does so by terminating and spawning a new process that inherits its role).

#!/bin/sh
{ sleep 5; echo waking up after 5 seconds; } &
{ sleep 1; echo waking up after 1 second; } &
wait
echo all jobs are done!

executing shell command in background from script

Leave off the quotes

$cmd &
$othercmd &

eg:

nicholas@nick-win7 /tmp
$ cat test
#!/bin/bash

cmd="ls -la"

$cmd &

nicholas@nick-win7 /tmp
$ ./test

nicholas@nick-win7 /tmp
$ total 6
drwxrwxrwt+ 1 nicholas root    0 2010-09-10 20:44 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 nicholas root 4096 2010-09-10 14:40 ..
-rwxrwxrwx  1 nicholas None   35 2010-09-10 20:44 test
-rwxr-xr-x  1 nicholas None   41 2010-09-10 20:43 test~

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

Check out the "nohup" program.

How to wait in bash for several subprocesses to finish, and return exit code !=0 when any subprocess ends with code !=0?

wait also (optionally) takes the PID of the process to wait for, and with $! you get the PID of the last command launched in the background.
Modify the loop to store the PID of each spawned sub-process into an array, and then loop again waiting on each PID.

# run processes and store pids in array
for i in $n_procs; do
    ./procs[${i}] &
    pids[${i}]=$!
done

# wait for all pids
for pid in ${pids[*]}; do
    wait $pid
done

How to put an executable script on the background and wake it up after x minutes

Just add an & to the end of last line. That is:

sleep $answer && echo foo &

How do I kill background processes / jobs when my shell script exits?

To clean up some mess, trap can be used. It can provide a list of stuff executed when a specific signal arrives:

trap "echo hello" SIGINT

but can also be used to execute something if the shell exits:

trap "killall background" EXIT

It's a builtin, so help trap will give you information (works with bash). If you only want to kill background jobs, you can do

trap 'kill $(jobs -p)' EXIT

Watch out to use single ', to prevent the shell from substituting the $() immediately.

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