I had to monitor a long-running process on a Solaris server tonight, but didn’t want to stay glued at a computer monitor. A neat trick:

ssh myserver.example.com "pwait 17601"; say "batch done"

You would replace 17601 with the process ID of the job you are waiting for, of course. That way, my Mac connects to the server, waits for the job to complete, then gives me an spoken alert when it is done. I can watch a movie, do chores or whatever during that time. I am sure there are equivalent commands to pwait for Linux.