Can a Windows batch file call another program without waiting for that program to finish?

Posted by iconoclast on Super User See other posts from Super User or by iconoclast
Published on 2012-08-23T22:25:43Z Indexed on 2012/09/01 21:40 UTC
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batch

I'm using Windows 7, and have a simple batch file to copy portable executables off my thumb drive to %TEMP%, and then start them. The goal is to prevent Windows from holding my thumbdrive hostage until I kill all the programs I started up from it.

However the control flow does not continue to the next app unless I kill the first one, which obviously doesn't work for this purpose.

In a Unix shell script I'd simply add & after the executable I start up, but I can't find an equivalent for batch files.

How can I do this?

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