My team's using Pallet (think Puppet in Clojure) to automate server provisioning, but running into a fairly fundamental problem: Pallet can execute arbitrary scripts directly on target VMs, but if one of those scripts happens to put a command in the background, it simply isn't executed.  At least, not in the way we're trying to engineer things.We've tried this using & and screen, with the latter being the ideal, and neither works.  For example, we've tried getting Pallet to execute the following script on the target VM...touch atouch b &touch cand all we see remotely is that files a and c exist.  The shell (or do I mean process?) in which the main script executed simply refused to execute 'touch b'.  On the other hand, if we execute this script with an ordinary terminal session on the same host, it works fine.Of course, we're attacking this from the Pallet angle.  But in case that doesn't bear fruit, can someone tell me under what kinds of circumstances a shell would refuse to execute a backgrounded process, in case it gives us a clue for a workaround?We're using CentOS 6.5 64 bit, though I expect that's not relevant.
Can't spawn backgrounded process
shell;scripting;background process