Use SSH to start a background process on a remote server, and exit session

Question

I am using SSH to start a background process on a remote server. This is what I have at the moment:

ssh remote_user@server.com \"nohup process &\"

Answer 1

When using nohup, make sure you also redirect stdin, stdout and stderr:

ssh user@server 'DISPLAY=:0 nohup xeyes < /dev/null > std.out 2> std.err &'

In this way you will be completely detached from the remote process. Be carefull with using ssh -f user@host... since that will only put the ssh process in the background on the calling side. You can verify this by running a ps -aux | grep ssh on the calling machine and this will show you that the ssh call is still active, but just put in the background.

In my example above I use DISPLAY=:0 since xeyes is an X11 program and I want it started on the remote machine.