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Unix for Advanced Users

8. Logging Out

8.2 Common problems when logging out

You may be denied the ability to log out.

8.2.1. Stopped processes

If your shell has any subprocesses that have been stopped (using the Ctrl-Z key sequence), your shell will not allow you to log out. Instead, it will print an error message explaining that there are stopped processes (or jobs).

To solve this problem, you can resume a stopped process using your shell's fg command. Then, after making sure all your information is saved, you can quit through the process's user interface. Alternately, you can simply issue the logout or exit command a second time, killing the process and all its subprocesses.

8.2.2. Malformed .logout File

Certain statements in your .logout file could cause problems during logout.

8.2.3 nohup

Sometimes you actually want processes to run after you logout. One way to do this is to invoke a command called nohup. nohup is short for no hang-up. Say you want to search a huge disk for a file but you want to logout and get a pizza while it is searching. You could type:

nohup find /bigdisk -name file

and the results will be stored in a file called nohup.out.

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