I can see where the nohup command can come in very handy. My question is, do you have to do something like this (nohup) in order to run certain cron jobs? On the windows side, I have a couple of scripts that basically run continuously, so all I have to do is ctrl-alt-del to lock my workstation, and the jobs continue to run.

Putting the ampersand sign ( & ) at the end of the command sets it in background mode.

When you log off (or have your session killed in some other way) all processes, either foreground or background, that had your terminal as a controlling tty get a hangup signal. nohup makes them ignore that signal.

A cron job does not have a controlling terminal. So there is no session whose death might send that hup. The same is true of "at" jobs.

So there really is no need to nohup a cron job.