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.

[vscodenpa]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 10 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[vscodenpa]

This feature request has not yet received the 10 community upvotes it takes to make to our backlog. 10 days to go. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding

[vscodenpa]

🙁 In the last 60 days, this feature request has received less than 10 community upvotes and we closed it. Still a big Thank You to you for taking the time to create this issue! To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!