NOHUP(1) General Commands Manual NOHUP(1)

nohup — invoke a utility immune to hangups

nohup utility [argument ...]

The nohup utility shall invoke the utility named by the utility operand with arguments supplied as the argument operands. At the time the named utility is invoked, the SIGHUP signal shall be set to be ignored. If the standard output is a terminal, all output written by the named utility to its standard output shall be appended to the end of the file nohup. out in the current directory. If nohup. out cannot be created or opened for appending, the output shall be appended to the end of the file nohup. out in the directory specified by the HOME environment variable. If neither file can be created or opened for appending, utility shall not be invoked. If a file is created, the file’s permission bits shall be set to | instead of the default specified in 2.9.1.4. If the standard error is a terminal, all output written by the named utility to its standard error shall be redirected to the same file descriptor as the standard output.

None.

The following operands shall be supported by the implementation:

utility

The name of a utility that is to be invoked. If the utility operand names any of the special built-in utilities in 3.14, the results are undefined.

argument

Any string to be supplied as an argument when invoking the utility named by the utility operand.

None.

None.

The following environment variables shall affect the execution of nohup:

This variable shall determine the pathname of the user’s home directory: if the output file nohup. out cannot be created in the current directory, the nohup utility shall use the directory named by HOME to create the file.

This variable shall determine the locale to use for the locale categories when both LC_ALL and the corresponding environment variable (beginning with LC_ ) do not specify a locale. See 2.6.

This variable shall determine the locale to be used to override any values for locale categories specified by the settings of LANG or any environment variables beginning with LC_.

This variable shall determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (e.g., single- versus multibyte characters in arguments).

This variable shall determine the language in which messages should be written.

This variable shall determine the search path that shall be used to locate the utility to be invoked. See 2.6.

The nohup utility shall take the standard action for all signals (see 2.11.5.4), except that SIGHUP shall be ignored.

If the standard output is not a terminal, the standard output of nohup shall be the standard output generated by the execution of the utility specified by the operands. Otherwise, nothing shall be written to the standard output.

If the standard output is a terminal, a message shall be written to the standard error, indicating the name of the file to which the output is being appended. The name of the file shall be either nohup. out or $ HOME / nohup. out.

If the standard output is a terminal, all output written by the named utility to the standard output and standard error is appended to the file nohup. out, which is created if it does not already exist.

None.

The nohup utility shall exit with one of the following values:

The utility specified by utility was found but could not be invoked.

An error occurred in the nohup utility or the utility specified by utility could not be found.

Otherwise, the exit status of nohup shall be that of the utility specified by the utility operand.

Default.

It is frequently desirable to apply nohup to pipelines or lists of commands. This can be done by placing pipelines and command lists in a single file; this file can then be invoked as a utility, and the nohup applies to everything in the file. Alternatively, the following command can be used to apply nohup to a complex command: nohup sh -c ’complex-command-line’ The bc(1) BSD version ignores SIGTERM and SIGHUP, and if ./ nohup. out cannot be used, it fails instead of trying to use $ HOME / nohup. out. The command, env, nohup, and xargs utilities have been specified to use exit code 127 if an error occurs so that applications can distinguish ‘‘failure to find a utility’’ from ‘‘invoked utility exited with an error indication.’’ The value 127 was chosen because it is not commonly used for other meanings; most utilities use small values for ‘‘normal error conditions’’ and the values above 128 can be confused with termination due to receipt of a signal. The value 126 was chosen in a similar manner to indicate that the utility could be found, but not invoked. Some scripts produce meaningful error messages differentiating the 126 and 127 cases. The distinction between exit codes 126 and 127 is based on KornShell practice that uses 127 when all attempts to exec the utility fail with ENOENT, and uses 126 when any attempt to exec the utility fails for any other reason.

The csh utility has a built-in version of nohup that acts differently than this. The term utility is used, rather than command, to highlight the fact that shell compound commands, pipelines, special built-ins, etc., cannot be used directly. However, utility includes user application programs and shell scripts, not just the standard utilities. Historical versions of the nohup utility use default file creation semantics. Some more recent versions use the permissions specified here as an added security precaution. Some historical implementations ignore SIGQUIT in addition to SIGHUP; others ignore SIGTERM. An earlier draft allowed, but did not require, SIGQUIT to be ignored. Several members of the balloting group objected, saying that nohup should only modify the handling of SIGHUP as required by this specification.

September 1991 posix.fail