On Windows I've started a program "async.cmd" with a ProcessBuilder like this:

ProcessBuilder processBuilder = new ProcessBuilder( "async.cmd" );
processBuilder.redirectErrorStream( true );
processBuilder.start();

Then I read the output of the process in a separate thread like this:

byte[] buffer = new byte[ 8192 ];
while( !interrupted() ) {
    int available = m_inputStream.available();
    if( available == 0 ) {
        Thread.sleep( 100 );
        continue;
    }

    int len = Math.min( buffer.length, available );
    len = m_inputStream.read( buffer, 0, len );
    if( len == -1 ) {
        throw new CX_InternalError();
    }
    String outString = new String( buffer, 0, len );
    m_output.append( outString );
}

Now it happened that the content of the file "async.cmd" was this:

REM start a command window 
start cmd /k

The process that started this extenal program terminated (process.waitFor() returned the exit value). Then I sent an readerThread.interrupt() to the reader thread and the thread terminated, too.

But there was still a thread running that wasn't terminating. This thread kept my java application running even if it exited its main method. With the debugger (eclipse) I wasn't able to suspend this thread. After I quit the opened command window, my java program exited, too.

Question

How can I quit my java program while the command window stays open?