How to Daemonize Any Process

I’ve been passively looking for a tip like this for a while. Often times, I’ll need to run a command on a server that takes a good 30 minutes to run (like loading a database dump for example). Normally, I’ll run the command in the background, followed by this:

while true; do sleep 60; date; done

This has been my timeout prevention to keep commands from dying – yes it’s a pretty stinking lame solution.

Especially lame when the server drops the connection anyways.

nohup saves the day

If you need to run a REALLY long command remotely that won’t die with an SSH time out, then “nohup” is your friend.

nohup shields the commands from “HUP” signals – a signal that is sent to all child processes upon disconnecting from a terminal, that normally will stop your process (gracefully).

For example:

nohup cat the_entire_internet.sql.bz2 | bunzip2 | mysql the_internet_production &

And then, nohup will probably say something like "nohup: ignoring input and redirecting stderr to stdout", but it’s of little consequence. You’re safe to quit your terminal and your process will be safely fostered by /sbin/launchd after you take it’s parent away. Ya big mean lug.