Yet another reason to love Linux!
I have a NAS with all my media (songs, movies, pictures, etc.) in a well organized format. I wanted to copy some of songs (well about 3GB) on my USB drive so that I can play it in my car. I know it sounds a bit old school if you are an iPad, iPhone user but this article is not about expensive hardware so let’s focus on Linux.
My NAS box runs a variation of Debian but this works for anything as it’s a core feature. You can run any command in background by appending an & at the end. The command will work and terminate as normal as long as it does not require a user interaction (input prompts, warning, etc.). If you run it via terminal or SSH the you have to enclose the whole command in () so that it does not end with your terminal session. With this in mind, I started my copy process from the NAS to USB (attached to the NAS) using a SSH session via Putty. Why? Because the other option was to do it via Windows which was going to be slow as it would be going via network and all those things. The best thing is that I could just start this process and do other stuff on my NAS box without being interrupted. I started this command, shut down my PC and went about my normal business. My files were copied after some time and all in usable condition.
Windows has BITS but that’s completely rubbish compared to this simple feature of Linux… Like I said, one more reason to love Linux as it’s so simple and makes Windows look like a piece of you-know-what.
Yes Linux is awesome!!