Is it possible for nohup to write the output both to the file nohup.out AND to the screen/terminal?

Question

I am using the bash shell. I frequently use nohup to ensure that my processes are not stopped when I close the shell/terminal that started them. I use a syntax like:

nohup myprocess

When starting, nohup gives the message:

nohup: ignoring input and appending output to 'nohup.out'

Then, nohup gives no more output to the screen; it is all written to nohup.out.

Frequently, however, I would like to monitor the progress of my computation. I can do this by reading nohup.out using vi or tail, but this can be time consuming to do a lot, especially when my computations take several hours.

Is there any way that I can print the output to both nohup.out (in case I lose internet connection and thus the terminal that started the process is closed) and to the screen? Thanks for your time.

Solution 1

You can run

nohup yourprocess & tail -f nohup.out

Solution 2

Proof.

nohup yourprocess 1>&2  | tee nohup.out &

Comments

[derobert]

Have you considered using screen or tmux instead of nohup?

[eikonal]

@derobert Thanks. I have screen on my system, but I have never used it. I don't have tmux on my system, but I can try to get it.

[jw013]

Just launch screen/tmux between logging in and starting myprocess. Then detach from it with prefix,d. screen's prefix is Ctrl-A, while tmux's prefix is Ctrl-B. You can log out but as long as the machine stays up, your screen/tmux session will too. Next time you log in, you can reattach the screen/tmux shell, via screen -r or tmux attach.

[Troyseph]

serverfault.com/questions/414341/redirect-nohup-to-stdout

[Adam Hunyadi]

tail -f is cool, unfortunately mine fails to display control characters properly

[Prajwel]

If you would like to change the nohup.out to something else, say run.log, and then follow it, use nohup myprocess > run.log 2>&1 & tail -f run.log