Thursday, March 22, 2012

Starting a program to run in the background from a DOS prompt


Picture by ro_buk on Flickr


From a bash shell you can run a command in the background by adding an "&" to the end of the command, but how do you do the same thing in Windows?

Using the START command lets you run a task in the background (maximised or minimised), or in the foreground.

For example the following would run memcached in the background minimized.

C:\>start /min D:\platform\memcached.exe

Microsoft's documentation is below, but it seems the options have changed. /m does not work but /min does.

Microsoft's documentation on START