What does the & mean when used in the end of a bash script?

I use a bash script for launching and add a & to the end, like this:

./bin/Startup.sh par1 &

What does the & symbol in the end mean?

Thanks.

Solution 1:

It tells the system to run the command in the background. From the bash man page on my system:

If a command is terminated by the control operator &, the shell executes the command in the background in a subshell. The shell does not wait for the command to finish, and the return status is 0. Commands separated by a ; are executed sequentially; the shell waits for each command to terminate in turn. The return status is the exit status of the last command executed.