What is the command to start a process in the background?

Starting a process in the background can be easily accomplished by appending an ampersand (&) to the end of a command. When you include this symbol at the end of your command line, it instructs the shell to run the command as a background job. This allows you to continue using the command line for other tasks without needing to wait for the background process to complete.

For example, if you have a command such as long_running_task, you would execute this in the following way to run it in the background: long_running_task &. This command creates a new job that runs concurrently while allowing you to perform other operations in the terminal.

The other commands mentioned do not offer this functionality: simply using run or start does not exist as standard shell commands for launching processes in the background, and using bg is specifically meant to resume paused jobs in the background rather than starting new ones. Therefore, the correct method to initiate a new background process is by appending & to your command.