Running Windows batch file commands asynchronously

Question

Say  if I have   foo exe bar exe baz exe   How do I run all of them from a batch file asynchronously  i e  without waiting for the previous program to stop

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

I could not get anything to work I ended up just using powershell to start bat scripts    sometimes even start cmd  c does not work not sure why    I even tried stuff like start cmd  c notepad  amp  exit  start-Process  c  BACKUP PRIVATE MobaXterm Portable MobaXterm Portable bat  -WindowStyle Hidden

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

[batch-file] Running Windows batch file commands asynchronously

Examples related to batch-file

Examples related to cmd