You don't use the ; with '&amp;', the '&amp;' on its own is enough to finish the command. I believe there is currently no mention of this behaviour in the manual. Your loop would simply be:

for dir in $(ls); do command $dir &amp; done


Additionally, you should consider using a glob instead of $(ls) which will fail if the filename contains whitespace. You can set nullglob to prevent dir being a * if there are no files:

shopt -s nullglob
for dir in *; do command $dir &amp; done


Using bash "&" operator with ";" delineator?
What kind of non-technical training course do you suggest for a programmer? Example could be public speaking course, presentation skill, English, business writing, or anything not related to programming or software engineering itself.
