I wanted to run compass in the background on a development server. That way my colleagues could edit the .scss file on the server (I know…) and not having to run their own version of compass on a Windows box.

The problem with using the & (ampersand) for forking a process in the shell is that whenever you close the shell the process is going to be killed because the parent process is killed. When using the nohup command the child process is going to ignore interrupts, quit signals, and hangups. It’s kind of a poor man’s daemon.

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nohup compass watch&