mv/cp in background

[Docbroke]

Can we have mv and cp run in background, and free clifm to do other things? This is particularly needed when copying multiple large files to different partitions or remote locations.
This may be different from what we expect when running mv/cp in terminal, but clifm is also a file-manager, so it is little counterintuitive to wait for mv/cp to finish before using clifm for other tasks. Sure we can start another instance of clifm but we still need to open all needed tabs and dirs.

[leo-arch]

Why not to use the x command? It will run a new instance of CliFM in the same path you're currently in. There you can fire up cp/mv and keep working as usual in the first instance.

One drawback nonetheless: this won't work for non-graphical environments.

[leo-arch]

I think I can select files in one instance of clifm and use other instances to copy/move

That would be an acceptable approach, but only for big files. For small ones workspaces work just fine.

[Docbroke]

yes indeed. This sounds good enough. For small files, workspaces, for large files and remote destinations, new instance.

[leo-arch]

What could be done, though I'm just thinking loud, is to launch cp/mv in a second terminal window. But I guess this would be a bit odd and annoying when copying small files: a terminal window would be launched to immediately dissapear.

[Docbroke]

I agree that backgrounding cp/mv is not very good idea, unless we are able to add some indicator of copy/mv progress and mechanism to stop it if needed, which probably is unwanted complication.

Popping terminals will surely annoy users. I remember when I used midnight commander there was a command to background copy/move progress. So if copying is taking time you can use keyboard shortcut to background that and keep using mc. However that probably used curses.

[leo-arch]

Well, I think you can do something similar, but needs to be tested: if cp/mv is taking too much, you can press C-x to launch a new instance. However, it needs to be tested: right now I cannot guarantee that this keybinding will be available while running a shell command. Maybe.

EDIT: No, it's not. For this to be done you need multi-threading.