Vim execute process in background - Glam Prestige Journal

I would like to run a process in the background in Vim on Mac OS X (or Unix in general).

I would hope and expect the following, or some variant, to accomplish this:

execute "!my_command &"

!my_command &

!my_command \&

or some other alternative.

Unfortunately this does not seem to execute my_command at all. I would expect there to be some lightweight option.

One option would be to write a wrapper script that forks the command and exits, but I'm sure someone has done that already (GNU Parallel?).

What is the best way to accomplish this?

2 Answers

This might be because my_command needs a terminal to interact with. You could provide one with GNU screen or tmux, e.g.:

!screen -dm "my_command"

Or:

!tmux new -d "my_command"

All of the commands below work as expected when executed in MacVim (snapshot 66), and I'm pretty sure they would work on my Ubuntu box at home:

!mplayer song.mp3 &
:execute "!mplayer song.mp3 &"
:call system("mplayer song.mp3 &")

If it doesn't work for you, you could try one of the few scripts that allow you to run asynchronous commands:

(and I just saw that Thor solved your problem)