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I often execute GUI programs, such as firefox and evince from shell. If I type "firefox &", firefox is considered as a bash job, so "fg" will bring it to foreground and "hang" the shell. This becomes annoying when I have some background jobs such as vim already running.

What I want is to launch firefox and dis-associate it with bash. Consider the following ideal case with my imaginary runbg:

$ vim foo.tex
ctrl+z and vim is job 1
$ pdflatex foo
$ runbg evince foo.pdf
evince runs in background and I get me bash prompt back
$ fg
vim goes foreground

Is there any way to do this using existing program? If not, I will write my own runbg.

Chenmunka
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Wu Yongzheng
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2 Answers2

4

How about this?

( firefox & )

This seems to keep it out of the jobs table, and fg can't see it at all.

JockoBudface
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1

Do this:

bash$ firefox &
bash$ disown

Bash has now forgotten about the background job you just created.

Fran
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  • After using it for sometime, I couldn't get used to it. The problem is I have to specify the job number. disown with no argument doesn't detach the previous background job, but the "current job", which I found strangely defined. – Wu Yongzheng Jun 12 '12 at 07:39
  • I believe the most-recently backgrounded job is always the current job, unless you change the current job before you type `disown`. – Fran Jun 12 '12 at 14:50
  • Hi Fran, try this. 1. vim foo; 2. gedit bar &; 3. disown; 4. fg. Step 3 disowns vim and step 4 brings gedit to foreground. After reading bash manual, I still don't know why bash considers vim as the current job in step 3. – Wu Yongzheng Jun 18 '12 at 09:22