The main purpose of bash (or of any shell) is to allow you to interact with the computer’s operating system so that you can accomplish whatever you need to do. Usually that involves launching programs, so the shell takes the commands you type, determines from that input what programs need to be run, and launches them for you.

Let’s take a look at the basic mechanism for launching jobs and explore some of the features bash offers for launching programs in the foreground or the background, sequentially or in parallel, indicating whether programs succeeded and more.