To whomever's listening -
I am trying to create indicator to display a system state string. This string comes from some software following a PUB-SUB architecture. My first thought was to use backtick to callout periodically to 'poll' the state, but the act of initializing, subscribing, getting a message, and unsubscribing has a lot of overhead. Since my software already supports PUB-SUB I was hoping backtick supports a background process. And, just my luck! It does!
"If both the lifespan and the autorefresh parameters are zero, the backtick program is expected to stay in the background and generate output once in a while. In this case, the command is executed right away and screen stores the last line of output. If a new line gets printed screen will automatically refresh the hardstatus or the captions."
However, it seems like the background command does not exit when screen exits.
I tried on both Ubuntu 14.04.4 updates