Your question and Fabian's answer got me to experimenting a little and I bumped into some "FUN WITH DOS" type stuff.

Open up a command window and do...

1. cd c:\temp

2. start /b

3. cd ..

Hit return five or six times - what you have
is two simultaneous dos sessions - interleaved into one dos window ! The other interesting thing is if you type "exit" in one of the "sessions" - it kills the other session (not the one your in) ?!?!?

I thought this was kinda cool - I mean - I've always known that you can start another DOS session in a window - then type exit to get back to the previous one - but this is funky !

I would imagine that something like "start /b dir" would be akin to a unix command like "ls &" (which starts a background process) which is probably what you were after.

The only difference is that in DOS - the background session doesn't terminate - you have to type "exit".

Shawn.