Ah the joy's of Linux basics. Sometime I feel pretty stupid... well... most of the time. I'm assuming that I can log out of the system while this is working? What does the nohup I mostly want this for security reasons. I want to start things at night and then logout completely. Or start something and walk away knowing that someone can't just walk up and fsck things up. so... $ make dep clean bzImage > make.log 2>&1 & will background it and I'll be able to logout completely and check the log when I get back. But I only really want the errors for a kernel compile. I can't seem to find that in the man page. guess - $ make dep clean bzImage 2&>make.err ? I dunno... screen also opens some interesting possibilities. sim > If you intend to background it immediately, try this: > > make > make.log 2>&1 & > > Then you can watch it by `tail -f make.log` > > If you decide after the fact, it's not quite as clean. Hit CTRL-Z to > suspend the program then type `bg` to background the task. The output > will still stream to the screen, so you may want to close the > terminal. > If there is a problem, then you won't be able to see the error > message. >