How can I run a windows batch file but hide the command window?

If you write an unmanaged program and use CreateProcess API then you should initialize lpStartupInfo parameter of the type STARTUPINFO so that wShowWindow field of the struct is SW_HIDE and not forget to use STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW flag in the dwFlags field of STARTUPINFO. Another method is to use CREATE_NO_WINDOW flag of dwCreationFlags parameter. The same trick work also with ShellExecute and ShellExecuteEx functions.

If you write a managed application you should follows advices from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmstall/archive/2006/09/28/createnowindow.aspx: initialize ProcessStartInfo with CreateNoWindow = true and UseShellExecute = false and then use as a parameter of . Exactly like in case of you can set property WindowStyle of ProcessStartInfo to ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden instead or together with CreateNoWindow = true.

You can use a VBS script which you start with wcsript.exe. Inside the script you can use CreateObject("WScript.Shell") and then Run with 0 as the second (intWindowStyle) parameter. See http://www.robvanderwoude.com/files/runnhide_vbs.txt as an example. I can continue with Kix, PowerShell and so on.

If you don't want to write any program you can use any existing utility like CMDOW /RUN /HID "c:\SomeDir\MyBatch.cmd", hstart /NOWINDOW /D=c:\scripts "c:\scripts\mybatch.bat", hstart /NOCONSOLE "batch_file_1.bat" which do exactly the same. I am sure that you will find much more such kind of free utilities.

In some scenario (for example starting from UNC path) it is important to set also a working directory to some local path (%SystemRoot%\system32 work always). This can be important for usage any from above listed variants of starting hidden batch.

Using C# it's very easy to start a batch command without having a window open. Have a look at the following code example:

        Process process = new Process();
        process.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
        process.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
        process.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
        process.StartInfo.FileName = "doSomeBatch.bat";
        process.Start();