On Sunday 30 March 2003 7:32 am, L. Mark Stone wrote:

I'm looking for the bash equivalents of two OS/2 command line features for running programs, "Start" and "Detach". I am probably missing the obvious, but I don't see the equivalent in the bash man pages.

Under OS/2, running "start program.exe" from a command prompt launched the application and freed up the command prompt for additional input immediately. Like in Linux, if you just ran "program.exe" at a command prompt, you no longer had use of the command prompt until you exited the program.

For start: <program> & The '&' puts it in the background.

Similarly, "detach program.exe" also launched the program and gave the user immediate access to the command prompt. But "detach" was used only for those programs that did not require any keyboard or mouse input, nor any screen output, to run. Under Windows, this would be called "Run as a Service."

Are there Linux equivalents to these commands?

TIA, Mark

Think '&' would also work in this case. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Bruce S. Marshall bmarsh@bmarsh.com Bellaire, MI 03/30/03 07:37 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive."

On 30-Mar-03 L. Mark Stone wrote:

I'm looking for the bash equivalents of two OS/2 command line features for running programs, "Start" and "Detach". I am probably missing the obvious, but I don't see the equivalent in the bash man pages.

Under OS/2, running "start program.exe" from a command prompt launched the application and freed up the command prompt for additional input immediately. Like in Linux, if you just ran "program.exe" at a command prompt, you no longer had use of the command prompt until you exited the program.

Similarly, "detach program.exe" also launched the program and gave the user immediate access to the command prompt. But "detach" was used only for those programs that did not require any keyboard or mouse input, nor any screen output, to run. Under Windows, this would be called "Run as a Service."

Are there Linux equivalents to these commands?

TIA, Mark

While not familiar with these OS/2 commands, from what you say above it looks as though "start" is used to launch a program which requires input to itself in its own window, while at the same time freeing up the command line for further independent use by the user, while "detach" launches a program which does not expect any further input from the user and also at the same time frees up the command line. In both cases, in Linux (and in Unix generally) the key to this is the command-line use of the symbol "&". In its simplest case, corresponding to what I have said about "detach" above, you would enter the following onto the command line (assuming the program you want to run is called "program1"): program1 & This will start "program1" running and detach it from the command line which started it. You will then get the command-line prompt back, and can use it quite independently for other purposes. This can also be used for programs which open their own separate windows for input once started. "program1 &" will start up the program, detach it from the command line, and the program itself will look after opening its own windows as needed. On the other hand, if "program1" expects its input to come from the window/terminal _within_ which it is running, then you will need (under X windows) to explicitly open a separate window to run it in. Example: xterm -e vim myfile & will open a new X window, enclosing an "xterm", within which vim will start up, opening the file "myfile" for editing, and (because of the "&") all this will again be detached from the originating command line. In this case it is strictly speaking the program "xterm" which gets detached; the program "vim" hangs off "xterm", so to speak, and the "xterm" will stay alive so long as the program which depends on it is still in use. The moment you finish with your "vim" session, closing the document you are editing and quitting "vim", the "xterm" will also close down. This use of "&" in known in the Unix world as "putting a process in the background". There are two associated commands: "bg" and "fg" (see "help bg" and "help fg" if running the bash shell). If a job has been put in the background (e.g. by using "&") after the command (say): program1 & you will see a job-number in [...] and process-id as soon as your command-lie prompt returns, e.g. xterm & [1] 5314 If you now did fg 1 you would re-attach the program (in this case "xterm") to the command line (though in this case, where the program is "xterm", nothing interesting would happen, except that the command-line would no longer accept independent input). Often, typing Ctrl-Z at a program which is running in the foreground will put it in the background, liberating the command-line, with a message like [1]+ Stopped xterm It could then be brought back to the foreground with "fg 1". I hope this helps! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 30-Mar-03 Time: 14:06:22 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

On Sunday 30 March 2003 12:32 pm, L. Mark Stone wrote:

I'm looking for the bash equivalents of two OS/2 command line features for running programs, "Start" and "Detach". I am probably missing the obvious, but I don't see the equivalent in the bash man pages.

I don't know the programs you are talking about in terms of OS/2, but I use "screen" for running jobs that may require text input at some later date. I use screen when running mutella [A gnucleus/etc style p2p fileshare client/server] screen mutella [This opens up the program in the current shell] ctrl+a d [This detaches the shell and returns the prompt] If I want to get back to it, I can run screen -r [ -r is reattach] The program runs in the background quite happily in my experience. YMMV :o) Hope this helps! Jon