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It's the Key and Peele of geek comics

When you first learnt about xkcd, did you not S L O O O R P the entire back catalogue?

I guess when I did that there were A LOT fewer. Cuz I'm old.

It could be a crate...

Good. If you couldn't that would be a real problem.

In bash, & just starts the program in the background, so all of the commands are run in parallel. You're probably thinking of &&, which runs the command on its left, checks its return code, and then decides whether run the command on the right.

Although, in this case there are no 'commands on the right' since all the commands are on separate lines. You'd need to backslash the commands together, something like

pip install "$1" && \
easy_install "$1" && \
...

That would be &&.

A single & will run them in parallel.

Yes, it should have been a ; instead.