xref: /illumos-gate/usr/src/man/man1/nohup.1 (revision 4c28a617e3922d92a58e813a5b955eb526b9c386)

Sun Microsystems, Inc. gratefully acknowledges The Open Group for
permission to reproduce portions of its copyrighted documentation.
Original documentation from The Open Group can be obtained online at
http://www.opengroup.org/bookstore/.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and The Open
Group, have given us permission to reprint portions of their
documentation.

In the following statement, the phrase ``this text'' refers to portions
of the system documentation.

Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form
in the SunOS Reference Manual, from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition,
Standard for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System
Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6,
Copyright (C) 2001-2004 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy
between these versions and the original IEEE and The Open Group
Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee
document. The original Standard can be obtained online at
http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html.

This notice shall appear on any product containing this material.

The contents of this file are subject to the terms of the
Common Development and Distribution License (the "License").
You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.

You can obtain a copy of the license at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE
or http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions
and limitations under the License.

When distributing Covered Code, include this CDDL HEADER in each
file and include the License file at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE.
If applicable, add the following below this CDDL HEADER, with the
fields enclosed by brackets "[]" replaced with your own identifying
information: Portions Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]


Copyright 1989 AT&T
Portions Copyright (c) 1992, X/Open Company Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright (c) 2006, Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

NOHUP 1 "Jun 19, 2006"
NAME
nohup - run a command immune to hangups
SYNOPSIS

/usr/bin/nohup command [argument]...

/usr/bin/nohup -p [-Fa] pid [pid]...

/usr/bin/nohup -g [-Fa] gpid [gpid]...

/usr/xpg4/bin/nohup command [argument]...
DESCRIPTION

The nohup utility invokes the named command with the arguments supplied. When the command is invoked, nohup arranges for the SIGHUP signal to be ignored by the process.

When invoked with the -p or -g flags, nohup arranges for processes already running as identified by a list of process IDs or a list of process group IDs to become immune to hangups.

The nohup utility can be used when it is known that command takes a long time to run and the user wants to log out of the terminal. When a shell exits, the system sends its children SIGHUP signals, which by default cause them to be killed. All stopped, running, and background jobs ignores SIGHUP and continue running, if their invocation is preceded by the nohup command or if the process programmatically has chosen to ignore SIGHUP. /usr/bin/nohup

Processes run by /usr/bin/nohup are immune to SIGHUP (hangup) and SIGQUIT (quit) signals.

/usr/bin/nohup -p [-Fa]

Processes specified by ID are made immune to SIGHUP and SIGQUIT, and all output to the controlling terminal is redirected to nohup.out. If -F is specified, nohup forces control of each process. If -a is specified, nohup changes the signal disposition of SIGHUP and SIGQUIT even if the process has installed a handler for either signal.

/usr/bin/nohup -g [-Fa]

Every process in the same process group as the processes specified by ID are made immune to SIGHUP and SIGQUIT, and all output to the controlling terminal is redirected to nohup.out. If -F is specified, nohup forces control of each process. If -a is specified, nohup changes the signal disposition of SIGHUP and SIGQUIT even if the process has installed a handler for either signal.

/usr/xpg4/bin/nohup

Processes run by /usr/xpg4/bin/nohup are immune to SIGHUP. The nohup utility does not arrange to make processes immune to a SIGTERM (terminate) signal, so unless they arrange to be immune to SIGTERM or the shell makes them immune to SIGTERM, they will receive it. If nohup.out is not writable in the current directory, output is redirected to $HOME/nohup.out. If a file is created, the file has read and write permission (600. See chmod(1). If the standard error is a terminal, it is redirected to the standard output, otherwise it is not redirected. The priority of the process run by nohup is not altered.

OPTIONS

The following options are supported: -a

Always changes the signal disposition of target processes. This option is valid only when specified with -p or -g.

-F

Force. Grabs the target processes even if another process has control. This option is valid only when specified with -p or -g.

-g

Operates on a list of process groups. This option is not valid with -p.

-p

Operates on a list of processes. This option is not valid with -g.

OPERANDS

The following operands are supported: pid

A decimal process ID to be manipulated by nohup -p.

pgid

A decimal process group ID to be manipulated by nohup -g.

command

The name of a command that is to be invoked. If the command operand names any of the special shell_builtins(1) utilities, the results are undefined.

argument

Any string to be supplied as an argument when invoking the command operand.

USAGE

Caution should be exercised when using the -F flag. Imposing two controlling processes on one victim process can lead to chaos. Safety is assured only if the primary controlling process, typically a debugger, has stopped the victim process and the primary controlling process is doing nothing at the moment of application of the proc tool in question.

EXAMPLES

Example 1 Applying nohup to pipelines or command lists

It is frequently desirable to apply nohup to pipelines or lists of commands. This can be done only by placing pipelines and command lists in a single file, called a shell script. One can then issue:

example$ nohup sh file 

and the nohup applies to everything in file. If the shell script file is to be executed often, then the need to type sh can be eliminated by giving file execute permission.

Add an ampersand and the contents of file are run in the background with interrupts also ignored (see sh(1)):

example$ nohup file &

Example 2 Applying nohup -p to a process

example$ long_running_command &
example$ nohup -p `pgrep long_running_command`

Example 3 Applying nohup -g to a process group

example$ make &
example$ ps -o sid -p $$
 SID
81079
example$ nohup -g `pgrep -s 81079 make`
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of nohup: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, PATH, NLSPATH, and PATH. HOME

Determine the path name of the user's home directory: if the output file nohup.out cannot be created in the current directory, the nohup command uses the directory named by HOME to create the file.

EXIT STATUS

The following exit values are returned: 126

command was found but could not be invoked.

127

An error occurred in nohup, or command could not be found

Otherwise, the exit values of nohup are those of the command operand.

FILES
nohup.out

The output file of the nohup execution if standard output is a terminal and if the current directory is writable.

$HOME/nohup.out

The output file of the nohup execution if standard output is a terminal and if the current directory is not writable.

ATTRIBUTES

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE ATTRIBUTE VALUE
CSI Enabled
ATTRIBUTE TYPE ATTRIBUTE VALUE
CSI Enabled
Interface Stability Standard
SEE ALSO

batch(1), chmod(1), csh(1), ksh(1), nice(1), pgrep(1), proc(1), ps(1), sh(1), shell_builtins(1), signal(3C), proc(4), attributes(5), environ(5), standards(5)

WARNINGS

If you are running the Korn shell (ksh(1)) as your login shell, and have nohup'ed jobs running when you attempt to log out, you are warned with the message:

You have jobs running.

You need to log out a second time to actually log out. However, your background jobs continues to run.

NOTES

The C-shell (csh(1)) has a built-in command nohup that provides immunity from SIGHUP, but does not redirect output to nohup.out. Commands executed with `&' are automatically immune to HUP signals while in the background.

nohup does not recognize command sequences. In the case of the following command,

example$ nohup command1; command2

the nohup utility applies only to command1. The command,

example$ nohup (command1; command2)

is syntactically incorrect.