What is an advantage of executing a process in background?

The most common reason to put a process in the background is to permit you to do something else interactively without waiting for the process to complete. At the end of the command you add the special background symbol, &. This symbol tells your shell to implement the given command in the background.

Example: cp *.* ../backup&   (cp is for copy)

execvp(path,argument_array); //argument array should be terminated by NULL