I honestly can't believe I can't find a solution for this online. I've run across a few things that seem similar, but nothing that really does what I want...
I'm trying to use a shell script to start a command. I don't care if/when/how/why it finishes. I want the process to start and run, but I want to be able to get back to my shell immediately...
Hope thats clear enough, I'm probably just missing something incredibly stupid
You can just run the script in the background:
$ myscript &
Note that this is different from putting the & inside your script, which probably won't do what you want.
Alternatively, after you got the program running, you can hit Ctrl-Z which stops your program and then type
bg
which puts your last stopped program in the background. (Useful if your started something without '&' and still want it in the backgroung without restarting it)
nohup cmd
doesn't hangup when you close the terminal. output by default does to nohup.out
You can combine this with backgrounding,
nohup cmd &
and get rid of the output,
nohup cmd > /dev/null 2>&1 &
you can also disown a command. type cmd, Ctrl-Z, bg, disown