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

Solution 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.

Solution 2:

From PowerShell Core 6.0 you are able to write & at end of command and it will be equivalent to running you pipeline in background in current working directory.

It's not equivalent to & in bash, it's just a nicer syntax for current PowerShell jobs feature. It returns a job object so you can use all other command that you would use for jobs. For example Receive-Job:

C:\utils> ping google.com &

Id     Name            PSJobTypeName   State         HasMoreData     Location             Command
--     ----            -------------   -----         -----------     --------             -------
35     Job35           BackgroundJob   Running       True            localhost            Microsoft.PowerShell.M...


C:\utils> Receive-Job 35

Pinging google.com [172.217.16.14] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 172.217.16.14: bytes=32 time=11ms TTL=55
Reply from 172.217.16.14: bytes=32 time=11ms TTL=55
Reply from 172.217.16.14: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=55
Reply from 172.217.16.14: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=55

Ping statistics for 172.217.16.14:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 10ms, Maximum = 11ms, Average = 10ms
C:\utils>

If you want to execute couple of statements in background you can combine & call operator, { } script block and this new & background operator like here:

& { cd .\SomeDir\; .\SomeLongRunningOperation.bat; cd ..; } &

Here's some more info from documentation pages:

from What's New in PowerShell Core 6.0:

Support backgrounding of pipelines with ampersand (&) (#3360)

Putting & at the end of a pipeline causes the pipeline to be run as a PowerShell job. When a pipeline is backgrounded, a job object is returned. Once the pipeline is running as a job, all of the standard *-Job cmdlets can be used to manage the job. Variables (ignoring process-specific variables) used in the pipeline are automatically copied to the job so Copy-Item $foo $bar & just works. The job is also run in the current directory instead of the user's home directory. For more information about PowerShell jobs, see about_Jobs.

from about_operators / Ampersand background operator &:

Ampersand background operator &

Runs the pipeline before it in a PowerShell job. The ampersand background operator acts similarly to the UNIX "ampersand operator" which famously runs the command before it as a background process. The ampersand background operator is built on top of PowerShell jobs so it shares a lot of functionality with Start-Job. The following command contains basic usage of the ampersand background operator.

Get-Process -Name pwsh &

This is functionally equivalent to the following usage of Start-Job.

Start-Job -ScriptBlock {Get-Process -Name pwsh}

Since it's functionally equivalent to using Start-Job, the ampersand background operator returns a Job object just like Start-Job does. This means that you are able to use Receive-Job and Remove-Job just as you would if you had used Start-Job to start the job.

$job = Get-Process -Name pwsh &
Receive-Job $job

Output

NPM(K)    PM(M)      WS(M)     CPU(s)      Id  SI ProcessName
------    -----      -----     ------      --  -- -----------
    0     0.00     221.16      25.90    6988 988 pwsh
    0     0.00     140.12      29.87   14845 845 pwsh
    0     0.00      85.51       0.91   19639 988 pwsh


$job = Get-Process -Name pwsh &
Remove-Job $job

For more information on PowerShell jobs, see about_Jobs.