How do you run multiple programs in parallel from a bash script?

Question

I am trying to write a .sh file that runs many programs simultaneously

I tried this

prog1 
prog2

But that runs prog1 then waits until prog1 ends and then starts prog2...

So how can I run them in parallel?

Answer 1

To run multiple programs in parallel:

prog1 &
prog2 &

If you need your script to wait for the programs to finish, you can add:

wait

at the point where you want the script to wait for them. For example:

prog1 &
prog2 &
# (do other things while 'prog1' and 'prog2' carry on
# in the background)
...
# (Now we need the results of 'prog1' and 'prog2'
# before continuing, so let's wait for them to
# finish)
wait