How can I run a shell script and immediately background it, however keep the ability to inspect its output any time by tailing /tmp/output.txt.
It would be nice if I can foreground the process too later.
It would be really cool if you can also show me how to "send" the backgrounded process in to a GNU screen that may or may not have been initialized.
Another way is using the nohup command with & at the end of the line.
Something like this
nohup whatevercommandyouwant whateverparameters &
This will run it in the background and send its output to a nohup.log file.
The modern and easy to use approach that allows managing multiple processes and has a nice terminal UI is hapless utility.
Install with pip install hapless (or python3 -m pip install hapless) and just run
$ hap run my-command # e.g. hap run python my_long_running_script.py
$ hap status # check all the launched processes
$ hap logs 4 # output logs for you 4th background process
$ hap logs -f 2 # continuously stream logs for the 2nd process
See docs for more info.
