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

How about:

prog1 & prog2 && fg

This will:

1. Start prog1.
2. Send it to background, but keep printing its output.
3. Start prog2, and keep it in foreground, so you can close it with ctrl-c.
4. When you close prog2, you'll return to prog1's foreground, so you can also close it with ctrl-c.

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.