Running Windows batch file commands asynchronously

Question

Using the START command to run each program should get you what you need:

START "title" [/D path] [options] "command" [parameters]

Every START invocation runs the command given in its parameter and returns immediately, unless executed with a /WAIT switch.

That applies to command-line apps. Apps without command line return immediately anyway, so to be sure, if you want to run all asynchronously, use START.

Combining a couple of the previous answers, you could try start /b cmd /c foo.exe.

For a trivial example, if you wanted to print out the versions of java/groovy/grails/gradle, you could do this in a batch file:

@start /b cmd /c java -version
@start /b cmd /c gradle -version
@start /b cmd /c groovy -version
@start /b cmd /c grails -version

If you have something like Process Explorer (Sysinternals), you will see a few child cmd.exe processes each with a java process (as per the above commands). The output will print to the screen in whatever order they finish.

start /b :  Start application without creating a new window. The
             application has ^C handling ignored. Unless the application
             enables ^C processing, ^Break is the only way to interrupt
             the application

cmd /c : Carries out the command specified by string and then terminates

You can use the start command to spawn background processes without launching new windows:

start /b foo.exe

The new process will not be interruptable with CTRL-C; you can kill it only with CTRL-BREAK (or by closing the window, or via Task Manager.)

Create a batch file with the following lines:

start foo.exe
start bar.exe
start baz.exe 

The start command runs your command in a new window, so all 3 commands would run asynchronously.

Use the START command:

start [programPath]

If the path to the program contains spaces remember to add quotes. In this case you also need to provide a title for the opening console window

start "[title]" "[program path]"

If you need to provide arguments append them at the end (outside the command quotes)

start "[title]" "[program path]" [list of command args]

Use the /b option to avoid opening a new console window (but in that case you cannot interrupt the application using CTRL-C

There's a third (and potentially much easier) option. If you want to spin up multiple instances of a single program, using a Unix-style command processor like Xargs or GNU Parallel can make that a fairly straightforward process.

There's a win32 Xargs clone called PPX2 that makes this fairly straightforward.

For instance, if you wanted to transcode a directory of video files, you could run the command:

dir /b *.mpg |ppx2 -P 4 -I {} -L 1 ffmpeg.exe -i "{}" -quality:v 1 "{}.mp4"

Picking this apart, dir /b *.mpg grabs a list of .mpg files in my current directory, the | operator pipes this list into ppx2, which then builds a series of commands to be executed in parallel; 4 at a time, as specified here by the -P 4 operator. The -L 1 operator tells ppx2 to only send one line of our directory listing to ffmpeg at a time.

After that, you just write your command line (ffmpeg.exe -i "{}" -quality:v 1 "{}.mp4"), and {} gets automatically substituted for each line of your directory listing.

It's not universally applicable to every case, but is a whole lot easier than using the batch file workarounds detailed above. Of course, if you're not dealing with a list of files, you could also pipe the contents of a textfile or any other program into the input of pxx2.