executing shell command in background from script

Question

how can I execute a shell command in the background from within a bash script, if the command is in a string?

For example:

#!/bin/bash
cmd="nohup mycommand";
other_cmd="nohup othercommand";

"$cmd &";
"$othercmd &";

this does not work -- how can I do this?

Answer 1

Leave off the quotes

$cmd &
$othercmd &

eg:

nicholas@nick-win7 /tmp
$ cat test
#!/bin/bash

cmd="ls -la"

$cmd &


nicholas@nick-win7 /tmp
$ ./test

nicholas@nick-win7 /tmp
$ total 6
drwxrwxrwt+ 1 nicholas root    0 2010-09-10 20:44 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 nicholas root 4096 2010-09-10 14:40 ..
-rwxrwxrwx  1 nicholas None   35 2010-09-10 20:44 test
-rwxr-xr-x  1 nicholas None   41 2010-09-10 20:43 test~

Answer 2

This works because the it's a static variable. You could do something much cooler like this:

filename="filename"
extension="txt"
for i in {1..20}; do
    eval "filename${i}=${filename}${i}.${extension}"
    touch filename${i}
    echo "this rox" > filename${i}
done

This code will create 20 files and dynamically set 20 variables. Of course you could use an array, but I'm just showing you the feature :). Note that you can use the variables $filename1, $filename2, $filename3... because they were created with evaluate command. In this case I'm just creating files, but you could use to create dynamically arguments to the commands, and then execute in background.