Processes (or getting control back)

When describing the command line, we’ve talked about the program finishing, and then you getting the prompt back. That means you can’t type any more commands until the command you issued has finished running.

Sometimes you want to set a command running, or launch a program, and then continue with the next command.

You can do this by running the command as a new process. On Unix, add a & on the end of the line.

The ampersand tells the command line to detach the command from the current process (which is running your command line) and run it in its own process.

This is common on our Unix system when you launch the editor (e.g., kate).

kate &

If you don’t add an ampersand, you’ll see the command window is not listening to your typing… until you kill Kate’s window.