How to detach my terminal window from a program ran from it? [closed]

This is usually handled by the shell, so it depends on the shell. That said, the relevant command is named the same across many different shells. Namely, the disown command. You can probably enter help disown for details relevant for your shell. Most likely it's bash, where the details are also described here. fish literally uses the situation you describe as an example. As illustrated there, and this should work for bash as well, you would enter something like:

firefox &; disown

Without arguments (for bash and fish at least), disown will disown the most recently used job. More generally, you can pass a PID or jobspec to indicate which background job to disown which you can get from ps or, depending on your shell, jobs will probably list them.

There's also the POSIX nohup command which spawns a process immune to SIGHUP, which the shell sends to the jobs it manages when it terminates. In this case, you have to know ahead of time, e.g. you'd enter nohup firefox &. That said, this makes the spawned process immune to SIGHUP from any source which may not be desirable.

posted 23 days ago

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23d ago

Derek Elkins‭

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