UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm writing a small console app to execute some commands over ssh. While testing I made it interactive so you can type in a command and get the text response. So if I type "ls" in prompt i get the list of files and folders in my home directory... as expected. But what happens when I, for instance, type "emacs". Of course, I don't get any text response, but is the emacs process running? How do I check if the process is running and how do I kill it if it's running?

Code:

man ps
man grep

Moderator's Comments:

Neo: Remember! RTFM-type replies are discouraged. Thanks.

Code:

ps -ef | grep "emacs" *

Thank you for the answer.

But what happens to it when I close my app? What is the parent process of the process I ran through my app? I didn't request a terminal through ssh I just executed the emacs command.

EDIT: *answers

What the application does depends on what the application is designed to do, of course. Well-coded interactive applications will check if they've been assigned a terminal with isatty() and refuse to run if not.

Your ssh session won't return until the application either finishes or closes all references to stdin, stdout, and stderr, so if ssh returns, it quite likely hasn't left any dangling frozen applications.

Their parent process is sshd, of course.

I am using libssh library for ssh and there's a function to request a terminal which I didn't use. I just used a function that executes the command without terminal. If I understand you correctly it's not so good idea?

Depends what you're trying to do. If you're trying to run things noninteractively, you should allocate no terminal and stick to noninteractive commands; you'd want interactive commands to fail instead of blocking forever when they're run by accident.