Using a for loop to access Command Prompt - powershell

Question

I want to call a function Christian.exe to the command line to act of a series of files that are indexed as "reentrant_008.sif" (8 is an example number).
"Christian.exe reentrant_00" & num & ".sif reentrant_00" & num & ".pgm" 0 2000 is the text that needs to be fed into the command prompt for the program to execute (num is an arbitrary number)
There are approximately 400 files, so I want to create a vbs code that calls the command prompt for each file until all the files have been accessed so far this is my code:
For
Dim cmdpath
num = CStr(i)
Set wshShell = WScript.CreateObject ("WSCript.shell")
If i < 10 Then
cmdpath = "Christian.exe reentrant_00" & num & ".sif reentrant_00" & num & ".pgm" 0 2000
Else
If i < 100 Then
cmdpath = "Christian.exe reentrant_0" & num & ".sif reentrant_0" & num & ".pgm" 0 2000
Else
cmdpath = "Christian.exe reentrant_" & num & ".sif reentrant_" & num & ".pgm" 0 2000
End If
End If
wshshell.run cmdpath
Next
Problem is that a new command prompt is being called for each file, which is slowing down my computer. How do I ensure that only one command window that addresses all my files is called?

Answer 1

If you look at the documentation for Run you will see two option arguments [intWindowStyle], [bWaitOnReturn]. If you want your EXE to wait before proceeding on the script change your call to this
wshshell.run cmdpath, 0, True
Where 0 will hide the window and True will wait for the program to finish before proceeding in the script. Depending on your needs you could change the number or remove it.
wshshell.run cmdpath,, True

Answer 2

Since you tagged your question with both vbscript and powershell I'm adding a PowerShell solution:
foreach ($i in 1..400) {
$num = "{0:d3}" -f $i
& Christian.exe "reentrant_${num}.sif" "reentrant_${num}.pgm" 0 2000
}
& is the call operator. I recommend using it whenever you run external commands in PowerShell, because otherwise you'll be in for a surprise when you try to run a command from a variable for the first time:
$christian = "Christian.exe"
$christian ... # <-- throws an error, because $christian contains a
# string, which is NOT automagically interpreted
# as a command by PowerShell
& $christian ... # <-- works
-f is the formatting operator, that allows you to create formatted string output. Since your command lines only differ by the zero-padding of the input and output files it's better to build the file names with pre-padded number strings.
I recommend doing the pre-padding in VBScript as well:
For i = 1 To 400
num = Right("000" & i, 3)
cmdpath = "Christian.exe reentrant_" & num & ".sif reentrant_" & num & _
".pgm" 0 2000
wshshell.run cmdpath, 0, True
Next