& symble is not working as running back ground process

[Tammy Liang]

I can not run process in back ground mode via &.

Help please...

[Mark Greene_1]

What shell are you using? What version of HP-UX? What command? Have you tried the command in the forground to verify it doesn't have errors and how long it runs? Have you tried something that you know is going to run for a while?

mark

[Tammy Liang]

/sbin/sh
OS 10.20
I am running as "ll &"..

It is working on the other systems, but not on this particualr system...

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

What happens when you try it? An error messages?

[Tammy Liang]

no, just display the contents of the directory on the screen when I run "ll &".

[Sundar_7]

ll & just display the contents of the directory ? - well, what else do you expect to see ? :-).

Even though the job starts in the background, the job sends the stdout and stderr to the terminal from which it is started.

Now I am curious, what do you mean when you say it is working in other systems ?

[Mark Greene_1]

what do you get when you run this:

ll ; echo $? & echo $?

[Patrick Wallek]

I have to agree with Sundar.

An 'll &' will STILL send its output to standard out, which is your terminal.

If you don't want to see anything you would do:

# ll > afile &
(redirect std out to a file)

or you could do

# ll > afile 2>&1 &
(Redireciret stderr to stdout and stdout to afile)

What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?

[RAC_1]

You must hae cheked this. Is there something in that dir???

Anil

[Tammy Liang]

I am posting the result that I have at two different systems with same command " ll &"

aktsds23 / # ll &
[1] 29913
aktsds23 / #

tcl3_APPMGR /users/me> ll &
[1] 24949
tcl3_APPMGR /users/me> total 11282
-rw-rw-r-- 1 t410e59 users 0 Apr 29 10:44 1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 t410e59 users 0 Apr 29 10:42 2
drwx------ 2 root sys 24 Sep 28 1994 Mail

[Tom Smith_9]

Hi Tammy,
What is the output of running "ll" without the "&" on the system in question?

Also, have you checked to see someone created an alias for "ll"?

[Mark Greene_1]

On the problem server run the "jobs" command to see if the job is still running in the background and hung. A control-Z should bring the job into the forground. If you do "who -u" there should be a tty assignment for your login ID. If not, this will hang some processes that have to interact with stdout.

[Tammy Liang]

Thanks all for replying my questions.
I take Patrick's suggestion to redirect my std and stderr to a file and run as back groud process. Still not sure why I have two different out put with the same command on these two systems.

[Govind_3]

May be your "ll" is aliased to something else like "ls -l" and thats the reason ll& is giving the output of "ls -l" try \ll& then you would use the unaliased version.
you could check to see which ll it would show if you are using the one u wnated or not!
-Cheers

[Mike Stroyan]

stty tostop
will cause a background process to wait when it tries to write to the terminal.

stty -tostop
will allow a background process to write to the terminal, (but not read from it.)

You can check which setting you have by running
stty -a