nohup as background task does NOT return prompt

Question

I am trying to run a long running task in the background without having to be logged in and have the terminal return a prompt, but when I do this, the task appears to go into th

Answer 1

You should have your prompt available because your command will be sent to the background. It is possible that you are not seeing your prompt because your command is still delivering stderr messages to your console. Try using > test.txt 2>&1 </dev/null &.