Quitting ssh -X session with a running GUI program but leaving the program to run on the remote host

Question

I have ssh-ed to a remote machine. I have enabled X11 forwarding (ssh -X) and I have started a GUI program.

The program takes 5 minutes to set up to do some processing but the actual processing takes 1-2 hours. I don't want to stream data while the program is working. I don't even want to see the program again as it produces files as output when it finishes and I can just scp them.

So how can I quit the ssh session but leave the program running on the machine? CRTL+C in the terminal?

EDIT: For the answer please see my comment just below.

Answer 1

Long story short - you can't do this without making some modifications to the way you run things. A GUI application requires for an X server target to be accepting it's GUI updates - if you're using your local X server to do this, then it'll require (1) the connection to be open (2) that you actually handle the updates.

A way around this is to use something like Xvfb - which is a headless way of hosting a virtual X-server. Above and beyond the examples provided on the wikipedia page, folks who seem to make frequent use of this mechanism are Selenium users.

Answer 2

Awesome, I've been looking for an acceptable answer to my problem for hours, and finally one pops up. ssh -X -f login@machine yourprogram worked perfectly for me. Though I used ssh -Y -f login@machine yourprogram. This has been driving me nuts.