The ampersnad tells bash to start the process in the background, so you
can do other things without having to start another shell. I don't,
however, think that you should start X in the background- there's no
reason (I can see) to do so. It dumps tons of info to the console, so
your prompt gets scrolled away very fast, and after X has started, you can
open all the Xterms you want.
To demonstrate, you might try "yes >/dev/null &" It will start yes, return
a PID and status for "yes" to the console, and then give you another
prompt. You can go do something else, while "yes" is running in the
background. Run "ps" to see it. If you've ever run yes before, you'll
know why I redirected the output. If not... try running "yes" without the
redirect, and you'll see.
To bring "yes" back to the foreground, type "fg" at the prompt. This will
bring to the foreground the most recent command sent to background. Now
you may type ^C (Control-C) to stop it. Another way to send a process to
the background is to suspend it (^Z) and then type "bg" at the following
prompt.
I hope that explains things well.
-Matt Stegman
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
On Fri, 16 Jul 1999, Kuraiken wrote:
> > for Xwindows type 'startx &'
>
> Excuse me but...
> (showing glaringly my newbie status :-))
> What's the ampersand for? I normally just type "startx" and hey presto! It
> starts.
>
