Handling Background tasks in UNIX

Launching a background task

1. Create a shell script that monitors the task that is running and restarts it if it dies.

#!bin/bash
until <python python_scipt.py>; do
    echo "script died with error #?. Restarting it" >&2
    sleep 1
done

2. Launch it with nohup

nohup <path to your shell script> &

How to kill a running background task

1. Determine the PID of running job

ps -aux | grep <script name>

This should return the PID associated with the script running in the system.

2. Kill the job

kill -9 <PID of the job to kill>