Why can't I use Unix Nohup with Bash For-loop?

Question

For example this line fails:

$ nohup for i in mydir/*.fasta; do ./myscript.sh "$i"; done > output.txt& -bash: syntax error near unexpected token `do 

What's the right way to do it?

Answer 1

Because 'nohup' expects a single-word command and its arguments - not a shell loop construct. You'd have to use:

nohup sh -c 'for i in mydir/*.fasta; do ./myscript.sh "$i"; done >output.txt' & 

Answer 2

You can do it on one line, but you might want to do it tomorrow too.

$ cat loopy.sh  #!/bin/sh # a line of text describing what this task does for i in mydir/*.fast ; do     ./myscript.sh "$i" done > output.txt $ chmod +x loopy.sh $ nohup loopy.sh &