I have a script (lets call it parent.sh) that makes 2 calls to a second script (child.sh) that runs a java process. The child.sh scripts are run in the background by placing an & at the end of the line in parent.sh. However, when i run parent.sh, i need to press Ctrl+C to return to the terminal screen. What is the reason for this? Is it something to do with the fact that the child.sh processes are running under the parent.sh process. So the parent.sh doesn't die until the childs do?
parent.sh
#!/bin/bash
child.sh param1a param2a &
child.sh param1b param2b &
exit 0
child.sh
#!/bin/bash
java com.test.Main
echo "Main Process Stopped" | mail -s "WARNING-Main Process is down." [email protected]
As you can see, I don't want to run the java process in the background because i want to send a mail out when the process dies. Doing it as above works fine from a functional standpoint, but i would like to know how i can get it to return to the terminal after executing parent.sh.
A single ampersand terminates an asynchronous command. An ampersand does the same thing as a semicolon or newline in that it indicates the end of a command, but it causes Bash to execute the command asynchronously.
nohup catches the hangup signal (see man 7 signal ) while the ampersand doesn't (except the shell is confgured that way or doesn't send SIGHUP at all). Normally, when running a command using & and exiting the shell afterwards, the shell will terminate the sub-command with the hangup signal ( kill -SIGHUP <pid> ).
When working at the command line or with batch files, you must take one of two actions when you use strings that contain an ampersand. Either you must escape the ampersand by using the caret (^) symbol, or you must enclose the string inside quotation marks.
$? - It gives the value stored in the variable "?". Some similar special parameters in BASH are 1,2,*,# ( Normally seen in echo command as $1 ,$2 , $* , $# , etc., ) . Follow this answer to receive notifications. edited Jun 20, 2020 at 9:12. CommunityBot.
The process was still linked to the controlling terminal because STDOUT
needs somewhere to go. You solved that problem by redirecting to a file ( > startup.log
).
If you're not interested in the output, discard STDOUT completely ( >/dev/null
).
If you're not interested in errors, either, discard both ( &>/dev/null
).
If you want the processes to keep running even after you log out of your terminal, use nohup — that effectively disconnects them from what you are doing and leaves them to quietly run in the background until you reboot your machine (or otherwise kill them).
nohup child.sh param1a param2a &>/dev/null &
What i ended up doing was to make to change parent.sh to the following
#!/bin/bash
child.sh param1a param2a > startup.log &
child.sh param1b param2b > startup2.log &
exit 0
I would not have come to this solution without your suggestions and root cause analysis of the issue. Thanks!
And apologies for my inaccurate comment. (There was no input, I answered from memory and I remembered incorrectly.)
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