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Nohup is a command used to run a process(job) on a server and have it continue after you have logged out or otherwise lost connection to the server. Nohup is best suited for long job runs.

Nohup is present on all the Unix compute servers. To use nohup to run a remote process, first you must connect to a remote server. DECS has Putty installed on the Window systems and OpenSSH installed on the Unix workstations. For more information on using ssh, please see this guide.

Once connected to a remote server, start the process. This is accomplished by typing in "nohup < command > &" (no quotes) at the terminal. Be sure to replace < command > with the name of your executable or that of the program you wish to use.

Once your process is running it shouldn't need anything from you until it's finished. To check to see if the process is still running simply connect to the machine you started it on and enter "ps -uyour_username" (no quotes). For example for username "doejon" the command would be ps -udoejon. If you see the name of your process/program among those listed then it hasn't finished yet.

To check the results or status of the programs, log back in to the same server. Once the job has finished its output will be contained in a file located within your home space. The filename will be "nohup.out" (no quotes). This file should be readable by any text editing program in Windows or Unix.