UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I've been recently doing a lot of batch operations; things that may take a day to completely run. I've heard and read a bit of many different programs to handle this sort of thing: cronjob to schedule tasks to occur periodically at/batch to run a task once at a specific time nohup to run a task immune to hangups I want to run a task in the background so that if I disconnect from the server, the program won't stop running. So, I've been using nohup programblahblah blah > output.txt & To shuffle it off to run in the background. Is this the best way? Thanks.

It does exactly what you think, runs in background in a way it won't hold open your shell window and won't die if your terminal does. If you're using this to manually run things in a manner that won't be killed, I don't see any problem with it.

For some shells(bash, ksh) you might want to add 'disown' after the & to prevent the shell's own job control from waiting for it or trying to kill it.

If this is part of a script, something which gets run automatically, it may be more appropriate to use a scheduling system like cron or at to control it instead.

Alright thanks.

I'm trying to grasp all the different tools at my disposal, so it's good to have a confirmation that I'm using them correctly.