how to avoid blocking side effect of a menu shell command

[Scott Tringali]

Jenô Balaskó (IJ/ETH) wrote:

> I should execute a command 'xclearcase' from Shell menu.
> I choosed dialog as output.
> Unfortunately the control is blocked by this application until
> it has been finished. Therefore the editing is stopped.

NEdit is waiting for the output to finish, as output to a dialog is not 
asynchronous.  If you don't care about the output, then this will work:

   xclearcase >& /dev/null &

There is a bug in 5.4 and previos where you will still see the watch 
cursor, but you can still type.  This is fixed in 5.5.