Starting a windows application in the background

Summary
In a UNIX shell you can use ampersand (&) to tell the shell to run a command in the background. Here is how to do it in the Windows command shell.

Once you know how to do it, the incantation is actually quite simple: start app.exe

Running an application in the background, means you can go on doing other things in the same command-line window, while you wait for the program to finish.

It is also useful if you’re writing a script and your language of choice has no support for fork and no access to the CreateProcess Windows API. You can just do something like system("start app.exe") and the system call will return control immediately, rather than blocking until app.exe finishes.