Redirecting output afterwards

[Ville Herva <vherva@babbage.tky.hut.fi>]

Often I've logged in from another location and then began executing a
large job, say "tar czvf foo /". Later, it turns out that the job will
take hours to complete, and I'll have to log out before that. Of course, I
will then ^Z, bg and disown the job, but I will lose the output. Sometimes
it is essential to know if the job returned errors or warnings. The output
itself is sometimes crucial (du, for example, can take hours in ~70GB data
dir).

Now, if I had been clever enough to realize this when I launched the job,
this would be no problem:

prompt % nohup job
prompt % job >& file &
  or even
prompt % screen job

but now the job has already been running for hours, and I wouldn't wan't
to start it all over again just to be able to log out and later see the
result.

What I was thinking is that could something like

prompt % job &
[1] 6643

(after some hours)
prompt % %1 >& output.file       # redirect output of a running job
prompt % disown %1
prompt % exit

be possible in theory?


-- 
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kyynisyyttä ja kaltaiseni luonne vaatii vuosikausien harjoituksen, en ole
mukava mies!  Hyväntahtoisuuteni loppuu tähän! Painukaa helvettiin!  Niin! 
En ole mukava mies!  E-en! En ole mukava, En ole mukava mies!" - YUP