Question

I want to start a command prompt but don’t want any output from it. So I am starting it as –

cmd /q dir

which works fine but one cmd.exe doesn’t exit. If I use this-

cmd /q /c  dir

I can see output of dir command which I don’t expect to see

Answer 1

The /Q option does not disable output, it only turns ECHO OFF. It is not normally needed, but there are occasions where it becomes useful.

To disable all non-error output, simply redirect the stdout to nul (>nul or 1>nul). If you also want to disable error output, then stderr must also be redirected (2>nul).

>nul 2>nul cmd /c dir

Addendum

Andriy M has a good point with his comment on the question. You can probably execute your command directly without going through CMD. Redirection would still work the same.

>nul 2>nul yourCommand.exe