"command goes here" > /dev/null 2>&1 &


I know what /dev/null is used for
and I know what & is used for in the very end
but what does 2>&1 do?

">" sends the standard output of the command to /dev/null (in this case).

"2>&1" sends the standard error to the same place the standard output is going.

"&" at the end says to run it in background. This gives you your prompt back and allows you to continue with doing other things. The first 2 options are somewhat typical when sending something off to run in background. The presumption is that it will log errors somewhere for you in some other way.

Note that background jobs launched from your terminal session are still tied to your terminal session. If you exit your terminal session you will kill the job.

so without the "2>&1" the error would appear on the screen?

I'm running the command through PHP exec()

yup.

If you were running php from a web page I'm not sure how it would work. But, from the command line, it would output to your terminal.