Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,

I tried searching for this, but I have yet to find anything useful. So here goes,
if a script executed from another script with nohup & hangs, does it affect the parent script? Reason I ask, we have a windows box with NFS, and we use it to store some of our files. Currently, I mount the NFS directories, using a script from the command line, after a reboot. I would like to automate this, but typically the windows box is rebooted at the same time, and if the mount gets executed prior to the windows box boot, the script hangs. I know nohup'ed processes ignore hang ups, but what happens if they hang? Any knowledge and/or guidance will be greatly appreciated.

Sully

"hang" is not a very technical term. If a program is taking a very long time it may be doing everything right. Or it may have a bug and be in an infinite loop. nohup will certainly not help you here. No reasonable person would think that it should. But if you type a command like:
/usr/bin/cat
the program will wait for input from the tty. If you don't know that, you may be staring at a screen wait for the cat command to end. This is a special type of "hang"...waiting for tty input. Should nohup protect you from this? Maybe it should, but it is surprisingly hard to do this safely. For better or worse, nohup does not protect you from this either. You can use "at now" to run stuff completely disconnected from a tty. And you're on your own if you have infinite loops.

Sorry about the slang...but thanks for the input.

Sully