2016-10-03

Close tmux window, not its child processes

This morning I wanted to open an old slideshow as a reference for a new document. The easiest way to pull up the PDF viewer was to create a new window in tmux; open evince; and close the tmux window. I was surprised by the following error:

# mike at ordi in ~/path/to/file [9:47:56]
$ evince old_slides.pdf&
[1] 23952

# mike at ordi in ~/path/to/file [9:48:22]
$ exit
zsh: you have running jobs.

There is a simple solution: disown.

# mike at ordi in ~/path/to/file [9:48:24]
$ disown

# mike at ordi in ~/path/to/file [9:50:24]
$ exit

This time there's no warning, and the PDF viewer survives when the tmux window is closed. Thanks to this post for the tip.