Backgrounding: nohup vs. screen

How weird is it that whenever I see someone advocating the use of the nohup command, my first reaction is to think "Huh. nohup, huh? I remember that thing."

The last time I had need for nohup, I was using the entire CWRU UNIX lab to brute force my login password. See, I'd put together an SSH key and promptly forgot the actual password. Not wanting to be locked out should anything happen to the keypair, I set about remotely logging into each workstation and running John the Ripper on my own entry in /etc/passwd.

Surprisingly, I didn't get expelled, and, to my knowledge, the admin just went out and killed the processes instead of, you know, killing me. Thanks, Carlin.

A few years later, I saw the light of GNU screen, which possesses all the functionality of nohup almost as an afterthought. Just press Ctrl-A Ctrl-D. screen does so much more than nohup that saying you can choose between screen or nohup is like saying you can choose between a unicycle or a Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible chauffeured by a neon green 600-pound gorilla who's smoking crack and swinging a katana around like he means business.

If I had to choose, I'd pick the gorilla car every time.