Vista or later
If you are on Windows Vista or later, it will come with PowerShell. The PowerShell one-liner (New-Object -ComObject "Shell.Application").FileRun()
will work.
You can run this directly from the legacy command line (or within a batch file) with the following:
powershell -c (New-Object -ComObject "Shell.Application").FileRun()
This is an adaptation of the VBScript command outlined below.
Pre-Vista
For older versions of Windows (this will also work in newer versions, but requires an additional file), you can do this via VBScript, using the Shell object:
dim oShell = CreateObject("shell.application")
oShell.FileRun()
Shrinking it into one line:
CreateObject("shell.application").FileRun()
Simple put that line into its own plain text file and save it with the extension .vbs
, e.g. ShowRunDialog.vbs
. Then run ShowRunDialog.vbs
from the command line.
This indirectly runs the RunFileDlg
function contained within shell32.dll
. See here.