What is the significance of &

We usually treat & as the address of variable. The same feature is incorporated in Unix as well. This is for redirecting the outputs from different operations.

For eg: ps >> /dev/null 2>&1

This is telling the kernel to put the error along with the normal outputs to the same file. &1 refers to the

filename that is referred for the standard output.

~ by devps on July 14, 2008.