close command / dos window

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Tyler Murray
Tyler Murray on 6 Sep 2016
Answered: Kevin Rawson on 7 Apr 2019
I am running a .bat file using either system() or dos() which opens a cmd window. I would like to close the cmd window when it is done. I have searched on here but haven't found a solution that works.
  1 Comment
dpb
dpb on 5 Jun 2017
Show the command you're executing...

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Answers (4)

Kevin Rawson
Kevin Rawson on 7 Apr 2019
Simplest way without modifying your original batch file would be to add an exit command to your system call.
system('yourScript.bat && exit &')
This will complete execution of "yourScript.bat" in a new DOS command window, and then close the spawned window.

dpb
dpb on 5 Jun 2017
If you must use the trailing '&' to dispatch the command window to the background while the Matlab system continues, then you don't have control of that window with just the supplied system. Others have shown a way to kill a process; the alternate would be to add an EXIT command as the last entry in the .bat file to close the session when the routine terminates.

Nagesh
Nagesh on 11 Jan 2017
Edited: Walter Roberson on 12 Jan 2017
let's say you want to kill both your progam (yourprogram.exe) and the cmd window that gets opened with the system command, you can use the following command
[status1]=system('"C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe" /F /im yourprogram.exe /im cmd.exe &');
This will kill 'yourprogram' and also closes 'cmd' window
  2 Comments
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 12 Jan 2017
That looks to me as if it would close all of the command windows. You might plausibly have another one that you did not want closed.
dpb
dpb on 27 Dec 2018
Edited: dpb on 27 Dec 2018
The other issue is that passing off TASKLIST or TASKKILL to the system via dos() spawns a new CMD.EXE besides any other that may be open -- w/o some other variable like the WINDOWTITLE if it were set uniquely when the process was started, you can't tell "who's who in the zoo" as to which it is, specifically, to kill.
(I was just thinking about the same problem as was spawning a bunch of editor windows to do some cleanup on Excel spreadsheet comments outside the sorry edit function it supplies for the purpose internally which is got me here now...)
ADDENDUM
I'd done this ages ago and had forgotten all I once knew...ran into one kicker I can't presently seemingly get around -- tasklist /fi "WINDOWTITLE eq title string" never returns a match, even if copy and paste what is returned by the /V option for the specific window so can't find a unique CMD.EXE amongst others that way, either. :(
ADDENDUM SECOND
Albeit one could return the list of all and parse it separately to find the PID, I suppose...
ADDENDUM THIRD
The simplest answer (just tested) is to do as suggested in above Answer; just add exit to the batch file to close the shell when the app exits back to command line. Done!

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Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 7 Sep 2016

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