nohup doesn't work with OS X Yosmite - get error "can't detach from console no such file or directory"

Question

I use nohup to run a command from a php application (I have a web page that sends POST request to php server to start a shell script in background).

It's something like

exec('nohup /home/user/test.sh > /home/user/test.log 2>&1 &')

This worked fine when I was using OS X Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). However, recently I upgraded my MAC to OS X Yosemite (OS X 10.10) and now it doesn't work any more.

In the test.log, I always get the message: nohup can't detach from console: no such file or directory.

If I just run the same command in bash directly, it works fine. I did a lot of searching, but seems like I can't find anything useful for this issue. What I only see is a discussion regarding Jenkins, it seems like they also see similar issue.

Anyone has any idea about why it starts to fail with Yosemite? Any input will be appreciated.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem when running a command on a mac mini from an ssh login, the error I got was:

nohup: can't detach from console: Undefined error: 0

I fixed the problem by removing "nohup" and redirecting stdin, the command that worked and survived "exit" looked like:

my_command < /dev/null > /dev/null 2> error.txt &

Answer 2

Are you running in tmux? I just had this issue, started a new terminal without tmux, and that worked fine.

See this tmux issue to explain why this happens. It stems from a quirk in OS X. https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/443