Ubuntu – How to skip the evaluation of ampersand in command line

In gedit's case, I just keep a copy open all the time. As long as you have an existing copy running, launching gedit calls from the terminal and then closing the terminal won't kill gedit.

For other things, what other people have said would work too. I'm a fan of nohup... But if you need a terminal you can detach but then re-attach to, you want to look at screen.

1. Run it in a terminal and then run something that keeps pushing output. I use the Django development server but irssi or even watch uptime would be good examples.
2. Kill the terminal and start a new one.
3. Run screen -r and BOOM, you're back in.

screen is a lot bigger than that and you can combine it with byobu for a better terminal experience. Read around.

Make sure all non-printable bytes in your PS1 are contained within \[ \]. Otherwise, bash will count them in the length of the prompt. It uses the length of the prompt to determine when to wrap the line.

For example, here bash counts the prompt as 19 columns wide, while the prompt displayed by the terminal is only 10 columns wide (My prompt written in cyan, and > written in default color):

PS1='\e[36mMy prompt\e[0m>'         # bash count: 19, actual: 10

while here it only counts the prompt as 10 columns wide because it ignores the bytes between the special \[ and \] escapes:

PS1='\[\e[36m\]My prompt\[\e[0m\]>' # bash count: 10, actual: 10

For good practice though, use tput to generate the terminal escapes rather than hard coding them:

cyan=$(tput setaf 6) # \e[36m
reset=$(tput sgr0)   # \e[0m
PS1='\[$cyan\]My prompt\[$reset\]>'

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/053, and also http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/terminalcodes for more on tput.