

The &
is an indicator to most shells to run this command in “the background”. Try and run ( sleep 10; echo hi ) &
- you’ll see you get your shell prompt back, where you can run more commands, but 10 second later you’ll see that ‘hi’ come through. ‘blocking’ is the default behavior, if you don’t add the &
you’re still going get the hi in ten seconds, but you don’t get a prompt because your shell’s execution is blocked until your command is done.
The doc here is indicating that you havea choice between autostart_blocking.sh
and autostart.sh
, the latter of which would be run with a &
. They could have expressed this better.
As for why your script didn’t work, I’d try executing it in a terminal to see what error message comes up.
Hi! I’m a dev with > 10 years of experience and I’ve been laid off twice in the past few years. Both times I’ve spent more than 5 months without a job. It’s not just you, hang in there. The current market conditions are tough with lots of layoffs in the industry and resume writing and reading getting automated.
I’d say keep your friends close - make sure they know you’re looking, frequently, as you’ve noticed an internal referral can speed things up; and keep busy - working on maybe some personal projects, or contributing to things that are out there can help keep you sharp, motivated and doesn’t hurt to have on that resume.
You can start looking at job aggregator sites, not just career pages. there’s indeed, builtin, etc etc etc. I personally also am a big fan of the hacker news monthly who’s hiring thread. It’s frequently a good way of getting in touch with folks who are hiring directly.