R help - Jan 2003 - Access to R from a remote location - follow up....background processes and such...

Aye, you can use the ampersand, but depending on how your shell is set up,
you're likely to kill the batch job if you log out of the shell while it is
still running.

Microsoft Terminal services, and I suspect citrix as well, has the option of
logging out but leaving the session open (for jobs to run, for instance.)

In unix, you'll want to use the ampersand (&) in your command to run a
process in the background, but you'll also want to redirect stdout and
stderr to files and then disown the process.

Have a look at this mailing list message:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/1998-04/msg00413.html

Another option is to run the process in a cron job...
http://www.superscripts.com/tutorial/crontab.html