What does “&” at the end of a linux command mean?

Question

I am the system administrator and I have been asked to run the Linux script to clean my system.

The command is this:

perl script.pl > output.log &

so this command is ending with the & sign, is there any special significance to it?

Answer 1

The '&' makes this command run in this background.

From man bash:

If the command is terminated by each control operator &, this shell executes each command in the background in the subshell. The shell does not wait for this command to finish, and the return status is 0.

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