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

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.