no screen, no nohup..

most of the it guys, me included, always face the situation like starting to delete or rsync some data in a ssh session, they realize that their isp is not so trusty or they have to go offline halfway through.

i would do the following actions in this situation 

•  cancel the process
•  run it using nohup, or run it in virtual terminal using screen

what will you do if the building three procedure of the rsync takes 4 hours and after 3 hours you catch yourself on a idea that you've forgotten to run it using above mentioned methods. of course you can kill the process and rerun it but it will be time wasting.

when  i were reading the bash reference manual in the section "7.1 job control basics" i found out that you were able to do that. there is the command called disown which helps you to do that.

here is the quote from manual concerning it:

disown [-ar] [-h] [jobspec ...]
Without options, each jobspec is removed from the table of active jobs. If the -h option is given, the job is not removed from the table, but is marked so that SIGHUP is not sent to the job if the shell receives a SIGHUP. If jobspec is not present, and neither the -a nor -r option is supplied, the current job is used. If no jobspec is supplied, the -a option means to remove or mark all jobs; the -r option without a jobspec argument restricts operation to running jobs. 

you can pause it (ctrl+z), background it (bg), and then disown  it so it is protected from SIGHUP when you quit your ssh session. 

watch the screen cast as an example