Does downloading a torrent file continues in background when I logout a session?

Kevin Fries Kevin at hcico.com
Mon Jan 10 19:46:47 UTC 2005


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James Mckenzie wrote:
| I think that if you use <Ctrl>+<Alt>+F2 to start a terminal session
vice starting a Terminal session in the GUI (KDE or Gnome) and then
start the btdownload process where you will have to provide the .torrent
to download as a background process (add <space> & to the end of the
command) will start the process in the background and will not stop the
download process if the GUI were to unexpectedly terminate or you were
to exit the GUI session.  I would not rely on starting a background
session in the GUI through a GUI terminal session and then exiting the
GUI session as the background process may be tied to the GUI session and
be killed by cleanup processes (these are designed to kill off processes
running when the GUI is exited and serve a 'good purpose'.)

WOW!

C-A-F1 -> C-A-F6 will attach to tty1 -> tty6.  When you log in, you
should create a session that is attached to the appropriate tty.  Any
process that you run within that terminal, should be attached to your
login session, unless it is double forked (this is how daemons work) or
unless Fedora is broke.  When you log out, it should destroy your
session killing any processes running under it, and create a new, empty
session that will hold the next user login.

Once you log out, all processes, even those in the background should
stop.  Always!  If they do not, something is not working correctly.  A
session should never live longer than the user is logged in, and no
process should outlive its parent.  This is security 101.

The alternative to that, as I stated in an earlier post is to use nohup.
~ The nohup command will create a file stream to output to, and attach
itself to the root process.  Since the process is no longer a descendant
of the session, it will not stop when the session is destroyed.  For
lack of a better explanation, it becomes a daemon.

For you Windows guys looking for an analogy, it is like using serverany
connect a non-service program to the service control manager (SCM).  You
can then log out, and the program will keep running because it is no
longer attached to your session, but instead attached to the SCM which
is started before you even get the "Press Control-Alt-Delete to login"
message.

So, if FC3 does continue to download your torrents after you log out,
someone needs to put a bug report into Fedora because this is a huge
security violation.  This would be a Microsoft type screwup.

- --
Kevin Fries
Network Administrator
Hydrologic Consultants, Inc of Colorado
(303) 969-8033    FAX: (303) 969-8357
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