Regarding hanging of ssh upon exit

[Erik Luijten]

Hi,

I would like to briefly comment on a problem mentioned in the file "TODO"
and also in the OpenSSH FAQ (question 3.10), namely the hanging of an ssh
connection (on Linux) if there are active processes.

It is stated that this has to do with the fact that children of the shell
are not killed upon exiting the shell. However, the problem also occurs if
a process is started with 'nohup'. This is very annoying, because it is
not uncommon to connect to a remote machine, start a lengthy
computation with 'nohup' and then exit. My point now is the following:

a) the workaround in the FAQ seems useless: after all one doesn't want 
   the new process to be killed.
b) the "TODO" file states "All current solutions break scp or leave
   processes hanging around after the ssh connection has ended."
   But the latter is exactly what one wants in the case of a nohup
   process. So wouldn't it be possible to implement one of these "current
   solutions" for this situation?

Many thanks (comments welcome!),

Erik Luijten


Erik Luijten           |   Institute for Physical Science & Technology
luijten at ipst.umd.edu   |   University of Maryland
Tel: +1-301-405-4821   |   College Park, MD 20742-2431, U.S.A.
Fax: +1-301-314-9404   |   http://pallas.umd.edu/~luijten
 * After August 17, 2001: MSE/Urbana-Champaign - luijten at uiuc.edu *