[plug] Crontab??

[Jay Warwick]

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 20:38, James Devenish wrote:

> Also, note that it might not be a good idea to attempt a "long-running"
> cron job. If you test the above and it works, you might then choose to
> change it to this in future:
> 
> 00      21      *       *       fri          env DISPLAY=:0 firefox &

A week or so ago I asked a crontab question and was informed my answer
was probably in the man pages - I was trying to get my computer to run a
virus scan on the whole system at a specific time each week.  The job
would not work, however if I simply ran the command myself it would
run.  After much searching on the internet I concluded that it must be
timing-out because crontab implements every minute so set-up a script to
be run instead. This brings me to my question - on the last line above,
what is the meaning of the '&', does it allow the job to stay open for a
longer period?