Running tophat dockerfile in background I need to use tophat2 to align some sequences, and I wish to use the docker container. These are large sequences so it will take a long time, plus I'm working on a university server so the chances of being kicked off the server are very high. How can I use nohup and &amp; to run tophat2 through docker, if I need some user interaction?
Assuming your user is in the group permitted to use docker:

docker pull quay.io/biocontainers/tophat:2.1.1--py27_3
nohup docker run -v /some/path:/data quay.io/biocontainers/tophat:2.1.1--py27_3 tophat2 ... &amp;


The only thing to remember is to mount everything you'll need into the docker container (/data in the example above). If you need to debug things then you can add the -it flag to docker run and use bash as the command.

As an aside, you might find using screen or tmux preferable to nohup ... &amp;, since you can reconnect to sessions with them.