Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a long running ksh script that I need to run with "nohup" in the backgound which is all well and good but at the very start of the script it needes to output to the screen to query the user and accept a response before continuing.

Any thoughts on how to accomplish this other than breaking the script into two scripts where the first one queries the user and based on the input executes the second script with nohup in background? Basically I would preferr to have a self contained script.

Thanks...

Probably the most effective way to do this would be to run it in GNU Screen. This would give it its own virtual terminal that you could talk to it with at will.

I'm not sure nohup would be necessary anymore if you plunked it in a screen session, either.

Do you mean:

Code:

nohup scriptname &

Any reason to not present the script with the parameter(s) on the command line?

Code:

nohup scriptname parameter &

I'm working in Solaris 10 and there is no GNU software on the system or at least none that I can find, but thanks for the idea as I've not heard of that before and it does sound useful.

I'm not sure what other way you could do this. If you put the script in the background, it loses the ability to read from the terminal. It can still write to it by opening /dev/tty, but it doesn't control the terminal, hence can't read from it... Just tried this out to be sure.

Not to mention that the output for the user is "lost" in nohup.out even if it's FG script. I guess I will have to break the script into two parts in separate files.

Thanks...

---------- Post updated at 12:36 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:32 PM ----------

In repsonse to methyl's suggestion: in this case I need the user to do something external to the script just after starting the script, before proceeding so a command line parameter does not work. Thanks.

A nohup-ed script can still open /dev/tty by itself and write to it. But reading just won't work.