How, from a cmd, start a new cmd instance and run a command within?

Question

I need to run two commands which never terminate. What I normally do is to

• start a cmd terminal and type in the first command
• start another cmd terminal and type in the second command

I then have my two processes running in parallel.

I now would like to automate this by having one "startup" file which would lauch the two terminals above. It can be cmd or PowerShell based.

Note 1: I tried to use cmd with /k or /c but this does not spawn a new terminal. Trying something like cmd /c cmd ended up with Internal Error output in the shell.

Note 2: PowerShell has Background Jobs. The problem is that I want to have two separate shells I can monitor the output on (and eventually close the running process with Ctrl-C.

Is there a way to achieve this in one file?

Solution

Create a batch file:

start cmd.exe /c <first command>
start cmd.exe /c <second command>

Run the batch file and it will open the two cmd windows and the batch file will exit.

Comments

[Bruno Bieri]

What does the "/c" flag stand for?

[Appleoddity]

@BrunoBieri /c tells cmd to run the command then exit. As opposed to /k that tells cmd to run the command and remain open - basically sit at the command prompt. If you need help with command line switches you can use cmd /?.