Running a command as a background process/service

Question

I have a Shell command that I'd like to run in the background and I've read that this can be done by suffixing an & to the command which causes it to run as a background process but I need some more functionality and was wondering how to go about it:

1. I'd like the command to start and run in the background every time the system restarts.
2. I'd like to be able to able to start and stop it as and when needed just like one can do service apache2 start.

How can I go about this? Is there a tool that allows me to run a command as a service?

I'm a little lost with this.

Thanks

Answer 1

For advanced job control with bash, you should look into the commands jobs bg and fg.

However, it seems like you're not really interested in running the command in the background. What you want to do is launch the command at startup. The way to do this varies depending on the Unix system you use, but try to look into the rc family of files (/etc/rc.local for example on Ubuntu). They contain scripts that will be executed after the init script.

Answer 2

UNIX systems can handle as many processes as you need simultaneously (just open new shell windows if you're in a GUI), so running a process in the background is only necessary if you need to carry on using the current shell window for other things once you've run an application or process that keeps running.

To run a command called command in background mode, you'd use:

command &

This is a special character that returns you to the command prompt once the process is started. There are other special characters that do other things, more info is available here.

Answer 3

Use nohup while directing the output to /dev/null

nohup command &>/dev/null &

Answer 4

Take a look at the daemon command, which can turn arbitrary processes into daemons. This will allow your script to act as a daemon without requiring you to do a lot of extra work. The next step is to invoke it automatically at boot. To know the correct way to do that, you'll need to provide your OS (or, for Linux, your distribution).

Answer 5

Based on this article:
http:// felixmilea.com/2014/12/running-bash-commands-background-properly/

...another good way is with screen eg:

screen -d -m -s "my session name" <command to run>

from the screen manual:

-d -m
Start screen in detached mode. This creates a new session but doesn't attach to it. This is useful for system startup scripts.

i.e. you can close your terminal, the process will continue running (unlike with &)

with screen you can also reattach to the session later