Hello guys, i am struggling to find out what symbols mean such as '&', in the command line. google doesn't detect symbols and there doesn't seem to be any man pages.
If someone could post a good link that can help me out on this, that'll be great.

it means to run in the background.. so if you issue a command and give & after the command the screen output wont be shown.

You will probably have to check a bash reference manual for this one. There are several of these as well as a ton of reserved words. The "&" symbol itself really just chains together commands. This is useful in a script where you need to execute one command then another. On the command line you can put several commands on the same line and they will execute one after another. This is commonly used in the xinitrc files in XOrg.

cbt is correct, liberalchrist is confusing & with && (logical and).


Bookmark this lot
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

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The man page you want is man bash . If you prefer a link, try this:

http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_bash.htm

cbtshare is correct, but "run in the background" may be a bit misleading: it actually spawns the command issued. Suppose you issue the command
kwrite
then kwrite will open in a new window, but the terminal will not receive a new prompt until that window is closed. On the other hand,
kwrite &
will open the new window in the same way, but the terminal will receive the new prompt immediately and may be used in parallel with kwrite.

2 members found this post helpful.

@Peverel is right...Thanks for posting an example of how to use it...

In my previous answer, I was commenting on cbtshare's response rather than the original question, but context is all: chrism01 is actually wrong, & is a logical and symbol, but bitwise. In bash as in the C programming language all expressions evaluate to numbers. Logically, a zero number is false, all others are true; however, a true result evaluates to one, false to zero.
Now if expr1 and expr2 are expressions, then
expr1 && expr2
evaluates to 1 if both are true, otherwise 0, so that
19 && 21
returns 1 (or true, in context).
Now 19 in binary is 10011 and 21 is 10101. Now
19 & 21
returns the bitwise and of these, which is 10001, that is 17 (or, again, true in context). Note also that, since 12 is 01100, then
19 & 12
is 00000 (0, false), whereas
19 && 12
is one (true).
So, be careful, an & at the end of a line is a very different from one in the middle. Also, bash tends to need brackets, which I have ignored for simplicity.

&& in bash is not logical and, it is a control operator

a logical and performs operation with 2 values and output a result, a control operator performs a control function

man bash

Cedrik: yes, you are right that && is a control operator, as is &, but in the bash man page you will also find, under
the text
which work as I indicated. Probably as in C, if the first argument to && is 0 or to || is nonzero, the second is not evaluated, similar to control operators, if you assume that returning exit status zero is true, all else false. However, since that analogy breaks down for &, it is perhaps dangerous.

Bash treats the arithmetic operators as arithmetic operators when they are found in arithmetic expressions which is:

• In let <arithmetic expression>
• In (( <arithmetic expression> ))
• In array subscripts, that is in ${array[ <arithmetic expression> ]}

EDIT: Bash treats the logical operators as logical operators when they are found in test expressions which is:

• In test <test expression>
• In [ <test expression> ]
• In [[ <test expression> ]]

EDIT 2: Bash treats the list operators && and || as list operators when they are found in lists of commands, that is command1 && command2 and command1 || command2 (allowing either command to itself be a list allows command1 && command2 || command3 and vice versa.

This has certainly been an informative thread, though I think the original poster just wanted appropriate reference material concerning symbols or operators "such as &".

Sometimes simple questions have complicated answers

and don't forget another usage:

woh. yeah this post has gotten a lot more technical than I'd expected it too. thanks for your detailed explanations. a lot of it is going over my head at the moment. I need to sit down and really evaluate all this lol. thanks.