Geeky interlude:

If you want to execute a process in the background in the shell, just append an ampersand to the end of the command. Most of the time this isn’t that useful, but the special appeal is when launch X apps from the shell. If you don’t append the &, the shell waits for the X app to terminate before returning a prompt, so the window is useless.

I spend quite a lot of time in Unix and just now found this tip out, as I’m writing my own simple shell for one of my classes. Cool tip indeed.