Shell commands are blocking -- work around?

[Geir A. Myrestrand]

Sarah Reichelt wrote:
> 
> Here is my way around this problem. The example below is for a "ping"
> command, but I'm sure you can adapt it to your stuff.
> 
> As you can see, I direct the output of the shell command to a
> temporary text file. The second part of the shell command containing
> the "2>&1 &" is the relevant section. I don't understand it but it
> works :-)

2>&1 means that you want anything sent to stderr (2) redirected to 
stdout (1), meaning that stdout now will be both stdout and stderr.

The trailing & simply means that you want to run it in the background, 
and you're then free to run other commands while this command is running 
in the background.


Geir A. Myrestrand