Can nohup Keep Your Linux Processes Running After Logout? A Practical Demo

Before diving into the main topic, let's briefly learn the Linux nohup command.

The nohup command is used when you want a process to continue running after you log out or close the terminal. It prevents the process from receiving a SIGHUP signal. A typical use case is keeping a message‑queue consumer alive.

Example command (shown in the image):

We open a shell and run a demo.php script that loops infinitely, printing a variable. The script is intended to verify whether nohup can run a process in the background. If it works, the numbers in nohup.out should keep increasing.

After starting the script with nohup php demo.php &, we observed that nohup.out indeed grew and the jobs command listed the background task. However, when we opened a new terminal window (a new session) and ran jobs, the task was not listed.

Investigation showed that the process was still running (checked with ps aux | grep demo.php) and nohup.out continued to receive output, indicating that the process survived the terminal closure.

The jobs command cannot display jobs across different sessions.

The nohup command can keep a script running in the background regardless of whether the user logs out.