nohup append the executed command at the top of the output file - linux

Let's say that we invoke the nohup in the following way:
nohup foo.py -n 20 2>&1 &
This will write the output to the nohup.out.
How could we achieve to have the whole command nohup foo.py -n 20 2>&1 & sitting at the top of the nohup.out (or any other specified output file) after which the regular output of the executed command will be written to that file?
The reason for this is for purely debugging purpose as there will be thousands of commands like this executed and very often some of them will crash due to various reasons. It's like a basic report kept in a file with the executed command written at the top followed by the output of the executed command.

A straightforward alternative would be something like:
myNohup() {
(
set +m # disable job control
[[ -t 0 ]] && exec </dev/null # redirect stdin away from tty
[[ -t 1 ]] && exec >nohup.out # redirect stdout away from tty
[[ -t 2 ]] && exec 2>&1 # redirect stderr away from tty
set -x # enable trace logging of all commands run
"$#" # run our arguments as a command
) & disown -h "$!" # do not forward any HUP signal to the child process
}
To define a command we can test this with:
waitAndWrite() { sleep 5; echo "finished"; }
...and run:
myNohup waitAndWrite
...will return immediately and, after five seconds, leave the following in nohup.out:
+ waitAndWrite
+ sleep 5
+ echo finished
finished
If you only want to write the exact command run without the side effects of xtrace, replace the set -x with (assuming bash 5.0 or newer) printf '%s\n' "${*#Q}".
For older versions of bash, you might instead consider printf '%q ' "$#"; printf '\n'.
This does differ a little from what the question proposes:
Redirections and other shell directives are not logged by set -x. When you run nohup foo 2>&1 &, the 2>&1 is not passed as an argument to nohup; instead, it's something the shell does before nohup is started. Similarly, the & is not an argument but an instruction to the shell not to wait() for the subprocess to finish before going on to future commands.

Related

command to redirect output to console and to a file at the same time works fine in bash. But how do i make it work in korn shell(ksh)

command to redirect output to console and to a file at the same time works fine in bash. But how do i make it work in korn shell(ksh).
All my scripts runs on korn shell so cant change them to bash for this particular command to work.
exec > >(tee -a $LOGFILE) 2>&1
In the code beneath I use the variable logfile, lowercase is better.
You can try something like
touch "${logfile}"
tail -f "${logfile}"&
tailpid=$!
trap 'kill -9 ${tailpid}' EXIT INT TERM
exec 1>"${logfile}" 2>&1
A not too unreasonable technique is to re-exec the shell with output to tee. That is, at the top of the script, do something like:
#!/bin/sh
test -z "$REXEC" && { REXEC=1 exec "$0" "$#" | tee -a $LOGFILE; exit; }

How to add nohup? - Redirect stdin to program and background

I have a program prog that takes stdin input like this:
prog < test.txt
But the processing takes quite a lot time, so once the input is read, it the process should background.
From this answer https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/71218/201221 I have working solution, but without nohup. How modify it to use nohup too?
#!/bin/sh
{ prog <&3 3<&- & } 3<&0
disown is a shell builtin which tells bash to remove a process from its recordkeeping -- including the recordkeeping that forwards HUP signals. Consequently, if stdin, stdout and stderr are all redirected or closed before the terminal disappears, there's absolutely no need for nohup so long as you use disown.
#!/bin/bash
logfile=nohup.out # change this to something that makes more sense.
[ -t 1 ] && exec >"$logfile" # do like nohup does: redirect stdout to logfile if TTY
[ -t 2 ] && exec 2>&1 # likewise, redirect stderr away from TTY
{ prog <&3 3<&- & } 3<&0
disown
If you really need compatibility with POSIX sh, then you'll want to capture stdin to a file (at a potentially very large cost to efficiency):
#!/bin/sh
# create a temporary file
tempfile=$(mktemp "${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/input.XXXXXX") || exit
# capture all of stdin to that temporary file
cat >"$tempfile"
# nohup a process that reads from that temporary file
tempfile="$tempfile" nohup sh -c 'prog <"$tempfile"; rm -f "$tempfile"' &
From what I see the following code is contained in a separate shell file:
#!/bin/sh
{ prog <&3 3<&- & } 3<&0
So, why not try just:
nohup the_file.sh &

Bash: How to get a script to rerun itself as a background task?

I'm writing a Bash script that is intended to be used as a daemon. If the user of my script does not pass a --sync option to the script, I want the script to rerun itself as a background task using that option. Here is my code (the last part was stolen from this SO post):
#!/usr/bin/env bash
args=("$#") # capture them here so we can use them if --sync's not passed
async=true
while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
case "$1" in
--sync)
async=false
;;
# other options
esac
shift
done
# if --sync isn't passed, rerun the script as a background task
$async && exec nohup "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" --sync "${args[#]}" 0<&- &> /dev/null &
For some reason, it doesn't seem to be working. When I do bash -x myscript (which helps debug the script), it seems that it just keeps on going even if $async is true, which I didn't think would happen since exec normally stops execution.
Likewise, if I run this command from my terminal:
exec nohup true 0<&- &> /dev/null &
it also fails to exit the shell, despite the use of exec. Why is this, and what can I do to work around it? (Bonus points: Is there any way to do this without creating a subshell?)
Thanks.
The & is being applied to the exec command itself, so exec foo & forks a new asynchronous subshell (or equivalent thereto, see below). That subshell immediately replaces itself with foo. If you want the parent (that is, your script) to terminate as well, you'll need to do so explicitly with an exit command.
The exec is probably not buying you anything here. Bash is clever enough to not actually start a subshell for a simple backgrounded command. So it should be sufficient to do:
if $async; then
nohup "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" --sync "${args[#]}" 0<&- &> /dev/null &
exit 0
fi
I don't know of a way to do this without a subshell. But when you write shell scripts, you get subshells. Personally I'd just use a simple variable and test it with something like if [[ $async ]]; instead of executing true or false, but since those are also bash builtins, it's pretty well equivalent. In other shells they might run in subshells.
Now that I think of it, since you're reprocessing all the options in async execution anyway, you might as well just fork and exit from within the case statement, so you don't need the second check at all:
case "$1" in
--sync)
nohup "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" --sync "${args[#]}" 0<&- &> /dev/null &
exit 0
;;
I disagree with rici's answer because the question clearly states background-ing is only wanted when --sync is NOT passed into the script. What was shown appears to be an infinite loop, and isn't checking all the parameters passed. I believe the original code was fine, except for the final "async && exec ...". The following replacement for that line should work:
if [ "$async" = true ]; then
nohup "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" --sync "${args[#]}" 0<&- &> /dev/null &
exit 0
fi
followed by what your code is supposed to do when --sync is passed.

Bash: Using SSH to start a long-running remote command and collect its PID

When I do the following, then I have to press CTRL-c afterwards or the shell acts weird. Left/right arrows keys e.g. doesn't move correctly and the text is messed up.
# read -r pid < <(ssh 10.10.10.46 'sleep 50 & echo $!') ; echo $pid
2135
# Killed by signal 2.
^C
#
I need this for a script, so I'd like to know why CTRL-c is needed and is it possible to work around it?
Update
It looks like it opens an extra Bash shell, and that is the one that needs to be exited.
The command I am actually interesting in is
read -r pid < <(ssh 10.10.10.46 "mbuffer -4 -v 0 -q -I 8023 > /tmp/mtest & echo $!"); echo $pid
Try this instead:
read -r pid \
< <(ssh 10.10.10.46 'nohup mbuffer >/tmp/mtest </dev/null 2>/tmp/mtest.err & echo $!')
Three important changes:
Use of nohup (you could also get a similar effect with the bash built-in disown)
Redirection of stdin and stderr to files (preventing them from holding handles that connect, eventually, to your terminal).
Use of single quotes for the remote command (with double-quotes, expansions happen before ssh is started, so the $! you get is the PID of the most recently started local background process).

How do I know if a bash script is running with nohup?

I have a script to process records in some files, it usually takes 1-2 hours. When it's running, it prints a progress of number of records processed.
Now, what I want to do is: when it's running with nohup, I don't want it to print the progress; it should print progress only when it run manually.
My question is how do I know if a bash script is running with nohup?
Suppose the command is nohup myscript.sh &. In the script, how do I get the nohup from command line? I tried to use $0, but it gives myscript.sh.
Checking for file redirections is not robust, since nohup can be (and often is) used in scripts where stdin, stdout and/or stderr are already explicitly redirected.
Aside from these redirections, the only thing nohup does is ignore the SIGHUP signal (thanks to Blrfl for the link.)
So, really what we're asking for is a way to detect if SIGHUP is being ignored. In linux, the signal ignore mask is exposed in /proc/$PID/status, in the least-significant bit of the SigIgn hex string.
Provided we know the pid of the bash script we want to check, we can use egrep. Here I see if the current shell is ignoring SIGHUP (i.e. is "nohuppy"):
$ egrep -q "SigIgn:\s.{15}[13579bdf]" /proc/$$/status && echo nohuppy || echo normal
normal
$ nohup bash -c 'egrep -q "SigIgn:\s.{15}[13579bdf]" /proc/$$/status && echo nohuppy || echo normal'; cat nohup.out
nohup: ignoring input and appending output to `nohup.out'
nohuppy
You could check if STDOUT is associated with a terminal:
[ -t 1 ]
You can either check if the parent pid is 1:
if [ $PPID -eq 1 ] ; then
echo "Parent pid=1 (runing via nohup)"
else
echo "Parent pid<>1 (NOT running via nohup)"
fi
or if your script ignores the SIGHUP signal (see https://stackoverflow.com/a/35638712/1011025):
if egrep -q "SigIgn:\s.{15}[13579bdf]" /proc/$$/status ; then
echo "Ignores SIGHUP (runing via nohup)"
else
echo "Doesn't ignore SIGHUP (NOT running via nohup)"
fi
One way, but not really portable would be to do a readlink on /proc/$$/fd/1 and test if it ends with nohup.out.
Assuming you are on the pts0 terminal (not really relevant, just to be able to show the result):
#!/bin/bash
if [[ $(readlink /proc/$$/fd/1) =~ nohup.out$ ]]; then
echo "Running under hup" >> /dev/pts/0
fi
But the traditional approach to such problems is to test if the output is a terminal:
[ -t 1 ]
Thank you guys. Check STDOUT is a good idea. I just find another way to do it. That is to test tty.
test tty -s check its return code. If it's 0 , then it's running on a terminal; if it's 1 then it's running with nohup.

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