Stupid question on suspend/resume and command-line FTP

[Charles Jones]

fouldragon at aol.com wrote:
> I use a home-brew backup script that basically loops through some 
> directories, grabbing a wad of files, tar/gzip them up, and FTP the 
> result to a distant server.  To minimize space footprint, it deletes 
> the file after FTP finishes, but it's a very primitive setup-- no error 
> catching and retrying.
>   
Do you have to use FTP? rsync (preferably over ssh) would work nicely. 
rsync can automatically delete the files for you once they have 
successfully transferred. rsync has extensive error checking and 
reporting.  You could have a shell script that rsyncs and parses the 
return status and sends you an alert if it failed (or restart the rsync 
- it will resume where it left off).
> Obviously, I forget to do it in the background, so I end up having to 
> control-z and "bg" it.
>
> And that leaves it on my jobs stack, so occasionally, I 'fg' one time 
> too many and end up re-suspending-and-backgrounding it.
>
>   

For times when you forget to run a process in screen and need to leave 
it, after you bg it you can do a "disown %1", and it will detach the 
process from your terminal such that if you get disconnected the process 
will still run, and it's stdout will go into the bit-bucket. Sadly there 
is no "reown" command so you won't be able to reattach to it (even if 
you havn't disconnected yet) like you can with screen. Another neat 
trick with disown is "disown -ah", which sets all your processes to 
ignore SIGHUPs, but does not detach the procs from your terminal...it's 
kind of like disconnection insurance, but still lets you bg and fg at will.

-Charles