Can I change the name of `nohup.out`?

Question

When I run nohup some_command &, the output goes to nohup.out; man nohup says to look at info nohup which in turn says:

If standard output is a terminal, the command's standard output is appended to the file 'nohup.out'; if that cannot be written to, it is appended to the file '$HOME/nohup.out'; and if that cannot be written to, the command is not run.

But if I already have one command using nohup with output going to /nohup.out and I want to run another, nohup command, can I redirect the output to nohup2.out?

Answer 1

nohup some_command &> nohup2.out&

and voila.

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Older syntax for Bash version < 4:

nohup some_command > nohup2.out 2>&1&

Answer 2

For some reason, the above answer did not work for me; I did not return to the command prompt after running it as I expected with the trailing &. Instead, I simply tried with

nohup some_command > nohup2.out&

and it works just as I want it to. Leaving this here in case someone else is in the same situation. Running Bash 4.3.8 for reference.

Answer 3

As the file handlers points to i-nodes (which are stored independently from file names) on Linux/Unix systems You can rename the default nohup.out to any other filename any time after starting nohup something&. So also one could do the following:

$ nohup something&
$ mv nohup.out nohup2.out
$ nohup something2&

Now something adds lines to nohup2.out and something2 to nohup.out.

Answer 4

Above methods will remove your output file data whenever you run above nohup command.

To Append output in user defined file you can use >> in nohup command.

nohup your_command >> filename.out &

This command will append all output in your file without removing old data.