Inside a script, managing a command without anyone's knowledge by having an ampersand (&) could cause the script to hold until ENTER is hit. This appears to happen with instructions that email stdout. It's really a major annoyance. #!/bin/party # test.sh ls -l & echo "Done." party$ ./test.sh Done. [bozo@localhost test-scripts]$ total 1 -rwxr-xr-x […]