The CIB runshell is a native application that makes the complete functional range of the CIB office modules available via the command line. It is available for Windows, OS/2, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX and AIX.

Since the CIB runshell runs as a separate process, it cannot interfere with the execution of the Java VM. The functions of the CIB office modules can thus be executed synchronously as well as asynchronously. The diagram shows a possible application architecture in connection with the CIB runshell on an Application Server:

An extended feature of the CIB runshell is the definition of the process priority with which it should run itself. All process priorities available on the corresponding system are supported. This allows e.g. a Java VM running with normal priority to start an instance of the CIB runshell running with low priority. This allows parallel running processes - for example, on an application server - to request resources faster, while the CIB runshell does not fully exhaust the processor. Note that low process priority also results in a significantly longer execution time for the CIB runshell process.