How can I run the git post-receive-email in the background?

Question

I have a post-receive hook that just calls /usr/share/git-core/contrib/hooks/post-receive-email

I'd like it to run in the background so that git does not get delayed after a commit. I've tried various techniques (exec, piping to "at now", nohup) but when I use any of these techniques no email gets sent. I suspect this has something to do with the use of stdin to pass in the args to the hook.

I guess I need to capture stdin but I've no idea how to do that.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

While this is probably not the answer you want, you could decouple the hook from the mail delivery using cron and a mail delivery script, dropping your desired email into a directory and having your script pick it up. If you didnt want to wait for the cron every-minute boundary, you could hack up a daemon that uses inotify to monitor that directory for dropped files.