Add a short sleep to tail of postStartCommand

[JamesHutchison]

The postStartCommand will execute the given command and then the parent process will abruptly terminate. This creates issues with executing background tasks. Take this bash script that is executed for example:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# run in the background at startup
nohup bash .devcontainer/postStartBackground.sh > ".dev_container_logs/postStartBackground.out" &

What behavior would you expect to happen here?

What does happen is that postStartBackground.out is created, but nothing is actually executed. The workaround is to add a sleep at the end of the script. My suggestion is to wrap the postStartCommand such that it also gives time for any background programs to execute.

[chrmarti]

Spawning the background process after nohup seems to make it work:

nohup bash -c '.devcontainer/postStartBackground.sh &' > ".dev_container_logs/postStartBackground.out"

Could you give that a try?

[JamesHutchison]

I'm sure that works, but it isn't really the point of this suggestion. If someone does background the nohup (or any other process) as the last command, there isn't a linter or anything to help them out, and it's easy to do. Likewise, it's difficult to reproduce since things run fine from within a user shell. A good UX is preventing user errors.

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