A Sourceful of Secrets

Here’s the scenario, you’re logged into your favorite *nix box and are using bash as your shell. You fired off some process which is going to take a while to run (and forgot to run screen) and you want to logout without killing that process. The command to use is disown. Here’s a really simple example:

$ ssh some-host
$ perl script-that-chugs-along.pl
$ Ctrl-Z (suspend)
$ bg (put it in background)
$ disown -h
$ logout

The disown command allows you to remove jobs from the list of active jobs associated with your login shell. Here’s an excerpt from the bash man page:

Without options, each jobspec is removed from the table of active jobs. If the -h option is given, the job is not removed from the table, but is marked so that SIGHUP is not sent to the job if the shell receives a SIGHUP.