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I have started downloading my ISO's etc directly to my fileserver using wget. After I close the ssh session, how can I check back on the download process?

Scenario: I start the download, then shut down my computer. The next day I ssh into the server and want to see if the download is still active, complete or has been interupted.

If you run wget and close the terminal or terminate your ssh session , it will terminate the wget process too. You need to run wget and keep it running even after the session is closed.

For that purpose there are many tools.

   wget -bqc http://path-to-url/linux.iso

You will see a PID on screen:

Continuing in background, pid 12345.

Where,

-b : Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is specified via the -o, output is redirected to wget-log.

-q : Turn off Wget’s output aka save disk space.

-c : Resume broken download i.e. continue getting a partially-downloaded file. This is useful when you want to finish up a download started by a previous instance of Wget, or by another program.

The nohup command

You can also use the nohup command to execute commands after you exit from a shell prompt. The syntax is:

   $ nohup wget -qc http://path-to-url/linux.iso &



   ## exit from shell or close the terminal ##

   $ exit

The disown bash command

Another option is to use the disown command as follows:

      $ wget -qc http://path-to-url/linux.iso &

      [1] 10685

      $ disown wget

     $ ps

        PID TTY          TIME CMD

        10685 pts/0    00:00:00 wget

        10687 pts/0    00:00:00 bash

        10708 pts/0    00:00:00 ps

     $ logout

The screen command

You can also use the screen command for this purpose.

Go to download directory and type

tail -f wget-log 

You can also use tmux (which is a bit like screen) but I think is easier to use.

sudo apt-get install tmux

tmux new -s <session-name>

then run you script in the session
press control + b + d to detach

when you want to get back the terminal simply do

tmux a

The advantage is that you can check back easily if anything has gone wrong but if you want to download lots of simultaneous files, maybe its easier to check the log

After a bit of Googling, I found an answer with the discovery an app called Screen.

After installation on the server (sudo apt-get install screen), you SSH into the server and open a screen session on the server with screen -S SESSION_NAME (replacing SESSION_NAME with any name you like). Then you run WGET and once the download is running, exit the session with CTRL+a, then press d (to detatch from the session. You can run multiple sessions (with different names) at the same time.

After re-login at a later date, you can check on your processes by SSHing into the server and reopening the screen session on the server with screen -r SESSION_NAME (to reconnect to the session).

Once the session is finished with, kill it with CTRL+a, then press k (to kill the session).

It's like having a virtual terminal within your virtual terminal.