background process popping up in foreground

noir911 · 12-14-2007, 09:43 PM

I am running bash v3.2.17 and when I try to run a process like fetchmail in the background (fetchmail &) it just pops up in the foreground saying how many messages it is downloading and if I hit the return key I get the shell prompt for a second and then fetchmail pops up again - is there any way to put the process in the background permanently until the job is done?

wit_273 · 12-14-2007, 11:53 PM

The output of some commands are still to the standard output even when ran in the background. You can usually resolve this by specifying and output file.

To output to a file

Code:

fetchmail > ./filename &

or to discard the output

Code:

fetchmail > /dev/null &