How to disown stuff because of UTF-8

How’d I Get Here?

I’ve been uploading files to DreamHost for a two days now, and duplicity just purrs away in my gnome-terminal shell doing what it does, out of sight and out of mind. However, one day I reallllly wanted to fix the annoying encoding default of ANSIX3.4-1968 gnome-terminal on my Gentoo machine.

After some research I learned that I needed to tweak some environmental variables and restart my gnome-terminals as they all run as one process it seems. I could test this out by setting LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and running gnome-terminal --disable-factory causing it to start a new process. Perfect, now I can fix everything. I dug through my init scripts and found that on Gentoo gdm (aka xdm in someplaces) sets the LANG variable that gets inherited down stream. I made an /etc/env.d/02locale file with the following:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
GDM_LANG=en_US.UTF-8

I ran env-update and all I needed to do was reload gdm and log back in.

Not quite that easy as I still have this duplicity process running and was approaching halfway at 2 days. If I had been smart when I started the backup I would have ran it in screen and just detached the screen session and let it run in the backgound, but I wasn’t.

There had to be a way to change the parent of the process I thought, and after some googling I discovered the bash disown function. Awesome. Apparently I could change the parent of the running processor so it wouldn’t close when I closed the terminal and subsequently my X session. So I opened the gnome-terminal running duplicity, CTRL+Z to stop the process, then I ran bg to background it in that terminal, and then I ran disown, and bam, its parent had changed to the init process as viewed by pstree success. Restarted my X session and it was still happily uploading away.

Now I know how to disown my computer and am no longer frustrated by UTF-8 and gnome-terminal.