nohup

nohup runs a command immune to SIGHUP, so it keeps running after the shell that launched it exits — the standard way to survive a closed terminal or dropped SSH session.

Basic Usage

Without a trailing & the shell still blocks on the command; nohup alone only changes signal handling, it doesn’t background the process.

nohup <command> &

Output Redirection

nohup also redirects stdout/stderr to nohup.out in the current directory if they’re still attached to a terminal. Redirect explicitly to control where logs land:

nohup <command> > <output.log> 2>&1 &

Detaching Fully (disown)

nohup blocks SIGHUP but the job is still tied to the shell’s job table — some shells send it a hangup anyway on exit. disown removes it from that table after backgrounding it:

nohup <command> &
disown

When to Reach for tmux/screen Instead

nohup is a one-shot fire-and-forget: no way to reattach and check progress interactively. For anything you’ll want to check back on, a terminal multiplexer session is a better fit than nohup + log tailing.

Cheatsheet

nohup <command> &                       # run detached from SIGHUP, background it
nohup <command> > <output.log> 2>&1 &   # background, redirect stdout+stderr
disown                                  # drop last background job from shell's job table
tail -f nohup.out                       # follow default nohup log