What Is a Background Process?
A background process is one started so that it does not occupy the foreground of the controlling terminal, freeing the shell to run further commands. It keeps executing but cannot read terminal input without being stopped, and its output may still appear on the terminal. The shell tracks it as a job that can be brought back to the foreground.
Why it matters
CI scripts often launch a service in the background to test against it, but a step ending can kill that process before it is used. Understanding background semantics explains why such helpers need explicit waiting or detachment.
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