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Comment by berbec | Hacker News Reader

Will there be the ability to disown, background, nohup processes and close the console, leaving the commands running?

Those sound like they'll be more like the responsibility of the terminal emulator, unfortunately.

Windows console applications aren't really able to live without being attached to a console. Now, a terminal might be able to implement those features...

actually now you've got me thinking. I'll play around with that idea. Definitely non-committal, but it might be possible in the future.

I mean, the same is true on Unix. If an app is in the background and wants to write to (or read from) the terminal, it gets SIGTTOU (SIGTTIN) sent to it immediately. It might have to be impossible on Windows to ignore SIGTTOU/SIGTTIN/SIGTSTOP, but I think that's just fine.

Mind you, ptys + tmux/similar is certainly very good, and if that's all we'll get that's still way way better than the current state of affairs, but if that's all that will be possible it should at least be possible to pause the console's output (and flow-control the console application).

The sad thing is that this was all already implemented and done in Microsoft's second POSIX subsystem for Windows NT. It provided signals and process groups support for job control shells. It had a full control sequence interpreter for output and control sequence generator for extended keys. There were termcap/terminfo database records that people had added to other operating systems. It had a line discipline with "canonical" and "raw" modes. It had pseudo-terminals, with both BSD and System 5 access semantics.

* https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb497016.aspx

* https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb463219.aspx

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12866843

* http://jdebp.info./FGA/interix-terminal-type.html

And Microsoft owns it.

I wish people would stop pointing at the Linux subsystem and using it as an example of the stuff Windows in general could do. The Linux subsystem is a subsystem. In NT terminology, that makes it practically a container. It's disconnected from the rest of the system. It can interact with the win32 world in only a few constrained ways. You can't deliver SIGWINCH to a win32 process!

Actually, the second POSIX subsystem could deliver signals to Win32 processes. Who pointed at the Linux subsystem, by the way?

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416392

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