Seperation of shell and program
 

If I launch a program from the shell it closes when I close that particular shell window. Putting an "&" symbol after the program was suggested to me, but I soon figured out that while letting my still use the shell for commands it still closes the program when I close the shell.

Use either "nohup" or "screen" to launch the program. The nohup program was written so that someone could log in remotely (back when you had Unix computers in Universities with people logging in on terminals), start a job that would run for a while (such as compiling a kernel for example) and log off without the process getting the HUP (hang up) signal. You redirect the output to a file instead of the screen. With the screen program, you can manage a group of virtual screens, similar to the way the ps command manages jobs.