How to force process to work in the background even if it refuses to?

Question

As an example:

$ vim &
[1] 19133
$ bg
[1]+ vim &

[1]+  Stopped                 vim
$

However, I do not want vim to stop when put in the background. Is that possible? (applies for other programs such as login and telnet too)

Whats the point of sending an interactive editor in the background and expected it to work in the background? its not clear..you can just use fg %1 (assuming the jon number is 1) to resume editing in the foreground.. — heemayl, Oct 07 '15 at 07:36

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 07 '15 at 09:02

1

Interactive processes that are sent to the background are suspended when they try to read input from the terminal. You can use a terminal multiplexer such as screen

screen -d -m vim

This create a new screen session and automatically detaches it. Use screen -r to reattach to it.

answered Oct 07 '15 at 09:02

adonis

1,724

I keep getting Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/1' - please check. when doing screen -r. – tildearrow Oct 07 '15 at 12:43
Nevermind, it was something regarding my SSH connection. Ignore the comment above please. – tildearrow Oct 07 '15 at 12:45
By the way, how can I send input to a detached screen without attaching it? – tildearrow Oct 07 '15 at 12:53
@tildearrow, unfortunately I don't know. This seems like a really nice question to ask in this site, though ;) – adonis Oct 07 '15 at 15:35

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 07 '15 at 07:24

I do not know whether it is right or wrong if we do

ping google.com &

than it is still running but if we do

cat >abc.txt &

it is not running.Reason for this may be the process which is interactive is stopped because yo can do any thing when these process is in background so save resources

How to force process to work in the background even if it refuses to?

2 Answers2