Hide Command Window in C# Application

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Before you say its a duplicate question, please let me explain (as I've read all similar threads).

My application has both of these settings:

  procStartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
  procStartInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden;

and is also has WindowsApplication as the output type.

The black window STILL comes up when I call a command line command. Is there anything else I can do to hide the window? It doesn't happen for all commands, XCOPY is a situation where it the black window does flash up. This only happens though when the destination I'm XCOPYing too already contains the file and it's prompting me if I want to replace it. Even if I pass in /Y it will still flash briefly.

I'm open to using vbscript if that will help, but any other ideas?

The client will call my executable and then pass in a command line command ie:

C:\MyProgram.exe start XCOPY c:\Test.txt c:\ProgramFiles\

Here's the full code of the application:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {      
            string command = GetCommandLineArugments(args);

            // /c tells cmd that we want it to execute the command that follows and then exit.
            System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo procStartInfo = new System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo("cmd.exe", "/c " + command);

            procStartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
            procStartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;

            // Do not create the black window.
            procStartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
            procStartInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden;

            System.Diagnostics.Process process = new System.Diagnostics.Process();
            process.StartInfo = procStartInfo;
            process.Start();

        }

    private static string GetCommandLineArugments(string[] args)
    {
        string retVal = string.Empty;

        foreach (string arg in args)
            retVal += " " + arg;


        return retVal;
    }
}
5 Answers

If you are calling cmd.exe in your C# code and passing the commands to it via standard input.WriteLine and you don't want your CMD window to pop up every time you run your code, you can simply write this command:

 test.StartInfo.FileName = "cmd.exe";
 test.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;

By setting create no window to false, we are running the command sent to the CMD in the background and the output is not being displayed to the user. By setting it to false, the CMD window pops up.

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