One thing that I haven't seen anybody mention yet is the screen command. The nice thing about screen is that it "multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes (typically interactive shells)". This allows you to start a program which prints status messages to STDOUT or STDERR, log out, log back in later, and reattach the process's standard input and output to your terminal to see what it's been up to.

--
Ryan Koppenhaver, Aspiring Perl Hacker
"I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave."