background process

[Ben Pfaff]

GATal@aol.com writes:

>     I did search through the archives, but was unable to find what I was 
> looking for. My question is about background processes... If I am logged in 
> as a normal user and run a background process and then log out, I would 
> expect that the process would terminate. (I'm about 90% sure on this part.) 

If you do that, the process receives a SIGHUP signal.  This may
or may not cause it to terminate.  Use `nohup' to run the program
if you don't want it to terminate when sent SIGHUP.

> However, I was wondering if I ran the process as root, would the activity 
> continue on even after I log off?

Same situation applies.

> More specifically, I wanted to tail a log 
> file, but wasn't sure what would happen if I logged off the machine. I wanted 
> to have other people be able view the accumulated results at a later time. I 
> hope that is specific enough. Hope to hear what people have to say. :)

If the logfile is managed by syslogd, then a better approach is
to add another line to /etc/syslog.conf:
	*.*,cron.!*,daemon.!*		/dev/tty11
	daemon.*			/dev/tty12
etc.
-- 
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"It's like herding cats, only most of the engineers are already
 sick of laser pointers."