Running a command as a background process/service

UNIX systems can handle as many processes as you need simultaneously (just open new shell windows if you're in a GUI), so running a process in the background is only necessary if you need to carry on using the current shell window for other things once you've run an application or process that keeps running.

To run a command called command in background mode, you'd use:

command &

This is a special character that returns you to the command prompt once the process is started. There are other special characters that do other things, more info is available here.

Take a look at the daemon command, which can turn arbitrary processes into daemons. This will allow your script to act as a daemon without requiring you to do a lot of extra work. The next step is to invoke it automatically at boot. To know the correct way to do that, you'll need to provide your OS (or, for Linux, your distribution).

Based on this article:
http:// felixmilea.com/2014/12/running-bash-commands-background-properly/

...another good way is with screen eg:

screen -d -m -s "my session name" <command to run>

from the screen manual:

-d -m
Start screen in detached mode. This creates a new session but doesn't attach to it. This is useful for system startup scripts.

i.e. you can close your terminal, the process will continue running (unlike with &)

with screen you can also reattach to the session later