START ["title"] [/D path] [/I] [/MIN] [/MAX] [/SEPARATE | /SHARED] [/LOW | /NORMAL | /HIGH | /REALTIME | /ABOVENORMAL | /BELOWNORMAL] [/AFFINITY <hex affinity>] [/WAIT] [/B] [command/program] [parameters]

“title”

Title to display in window title bar.

path

Starting directory

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

I

The new environment will be the original environment passed to the cmd.exe and not the current environment.

MIN

Start window minimized

MAX

Start window maximized

SEPARATE

Start 16-bit Windows program in separate memory space

SHARED

Start 16-bit Windows program in shared memory space

LOW

Start application in the IDLE priority class

NORMAL

Start application in the NORMAL priority class

HIGH

Start application in the HIGH priority class

REALTIME

Start application in the REALTIME priority class

ABOVENORMAL

Start application in the ABOVENORMAL priority class

BELOWNORMAL

Start application in the BELOWNORMAL priority class

AFFINITY

The new application will have the specified processor affinity mask, expressed as a hexadecimal number.

WAIT

Start application and wait for it to terminate

command/program

If it is an internal cmd command or a batch file then the command processor is run with the /K switch to cmd.exe. This means that the window will remain after the command has been run.

If it is not an internal cmd command or batch file then it is a program and will run as either a windowed application or a console application.

parameters

These are the parameters passed to the command/program

NOTE: The SEPERATE and SHARED options are not supported on 64-bit platforms.

If Command Extensions are enabled, external command invocation through the command line or the START command changes as follows:

• Non-executable files may be invoked through their file association just by typing the name of the file as a command. (e.g. WORD.DOC would launch the application associated with the .DOC file extension). See the ASSOC and FTYPE commands for how to create these associations from within a command script.
• When executing an application that is a 32-bit GUI application, CMD.EXE does not wait for the application to terminate before returning to the command prompt. This new behavior does NOT occur if executing within a command script.
• When executing a command line whose first token is the string “CMD ” without an extension or path qualifier, then “CMD” is replaced with the value of the COMSPEC variable. This prevents picking up CMD.EXE from the current directory.
• When executing a command line whose first token does NOT contain an extension, then CMD.EXE uses the value of the PATHEXT environment variable to determine which extensions to look for and in what order. The default value for the PATHEXT variable is:
  

  .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD

  Notice the syntax is the same as the PATH variable, with semicolons separating the different elements.

When searching for an executable, if there is no match on any extension, then looks to see if the name matches a directory name. If it does, the START command launches the Explorer on that path. If done from the command line, it is the equivalent to doing a CD /D to that path.