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up vote 12 down vote favorite

I don't understand why exit & does not work. Why does it not?

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2  
dummy question. I'd vote for closing it. – poige Aug 15 at 14:03
But people may not find the truth on demand then :( – Pedro Ziff Aug 15 at 14:05
Dummy truth isn't worth finding, don't worry ;) – poige Aug 15 at 14:06
2  
But I am happy I found it, life fulfilled suddenly. :) – Pedro Ziff Aug 15 at 14:07
Same reason cd / & "doesn't work" – kojiro Aug 16 at 11:20

2 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

I think it works. But probably it doesn't do what you expect.

 $ exit &

Will create a sub-shell process, and make it run as a background job which will just finish right away.

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In other words, this is the "fake your own death" operator. – Kaz Aug 15 at 19:54
up vote 9 down vote

It does work. & forks the shell, starting a new process (you could think of it as & exit, except of course that syntax actually means something else). exit is a shell built-in that ends the shell process -- in this case the new backgrounded shell.

> exit &
[1] 1709
> ps -p 1709
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
[1]+  Done                    exit

There's your job. It's done. It worked.

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