Running One or More Tasks in the Background

At first, this may seem out of place. But running one task in the background is necessary as a foundation for the next section. Put the & (ampersand) symbol at the end of any command to make it run in the background. A background process runs without any user input. The shell is not forced to wait until the process is complete before it is freed up to allow more commands to be input and run. When you tell a command to run in the background, you are given its job number in brackets followed by its PID, or process ID number. You can use this to manage the process later, if necessary.

matthew@seymour:~$ command &[1] 11423

You can input a list of several commands to run in ...

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