Powershell equivalent of bash ampersand (&) for forking/running background processes

Question

In bash the ampersand (&) can be used to run a command in the background and return interactive control to the user before the command has finished running. Is there an equivalent method of doing this in Powershell?

Example of usage in bash:

 sleep 30 &

Answer 1

As long as the command is an executable or a file that has an associated executable, use Start-Process (available from v2):

Start-Process -NoNewWindow ping google.com

You can also add this as a function in your profile:

function bg() {Start-Process -NoNewWindow @args}

and then the invocation becomes:

bg ping google.com

In my opinion, Start-Job is an overkill for the simple use case of running a process in the background:

1. Start-Job does not have access to your existing scope (because it runs in a separate session). You cannot do "Start-Job {notepad $myfile}"
2. Start-Job does not preserve the current directory (because it runs in a separate session). You cannot do "Start-Job {notepad myfile.txt}" where myfile.txt is in the current directory.
3. The output is not displayed automatically. You need to run Receive-Job with the ID of the job as parameter.

NOTE: Regarding your initial example, "bg sleep 30" would not work because sleep is a Powershell commandlet. Start-Process only works when you actually fork a process.