Re: what does & mean in the vim command?

2015-07-08 9:06 GMT+03:00 Eric Christopherson <echristopherson@gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Jul 07, 2015, elearn2014@gmail.com wrote:
>> Here is a viim command
>>
>> nnoremap <silent> <F6>f :!firefox 'http://127.0.0.1/%:t' &<CR>
>>
>> What does &<CR> in the end of the command mean?
>
> The <CR> means a carriage return is sent at the end. The & is a Unix
> shell directive (I'm not sure if that's the right word) to make it
> execute the command (i.e., the firefox command) in the background and
> immediately return control.

It is not a directive, it is officially an operator:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_09_03.
And it does not need to return control at all; the only thing that
standard says on the matter is that "the shell shall not wait for the
command to finish before executing the next command". I have not found
anything regarding what shall be done with backgrounded commands when
shell exits, but all shell implementations I know simply exit without
sending backgrounded processes anything, thus letting init take the
parentship and background process continue to run.

Shell does not return control intentionally, it simply exits when
there are no more commands to run.

>
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> Eric Christopherson
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