I can see what is happening I am just having trouble understanding why it works

I figured the order was important. I thought if the child inherited normal STDIN etc then redirected them it would be the same as running a normal script and trying to detach by redirecting STDIN etc (see 1). The child wouldn't be detached and would die on SIGHUP or whatever.

I might just have to accept that I see it but don't fully understand it. Thanks for your posts though!

(1) I have tried the daemon script without fork and it doesn't work since just doing the redirecting of file descriptors of a process doesn't seem to detach.