Testing &

[katherinegallaher]

I'm trying to do what Mike said in lecture today to test &, trying "cat /dev/random > rand &"
and > doesn't seem to work? It does not create a file called rand but it kind of does run in the background, the random numbers still show in the terminal but it allows me to write in commands.
Is there a reason that output redirection does not work ?

[mikeizbicki]

hmmm... my example wasn't as good as I thought it was. Output redirection is a feature of the bash shell, and something you'll be implementing in a future homework assignment. That's why it's not working.

Based on the description of your output, it sounds like cat is being correctly sent to the background. You can kill the process using the kill command to stop the random characters being printed.