Open a new prompt/terminal window from Java

Will this work?

// windows only
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd /c start cmd.exe");
p.waitFor();

Opening an actual terminal window will definitely require different code for each OS. For Mac, you want something like:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/usr/bin/open -a Terminal /path/to/the/executable");

I've used this on Ubuntu(X11 Desktop) 10.04 ~ 14.04, and other Debian distro's. Works fine; although, you may consider using Java's ProcessBuilder.

     // GNU/Linux -- example

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator --disable-factory -e cat README.txt");

 //  --disable-factory    Do not register with the activation nameserver, do not re-use an active terminal
//    -e                  Execute the argument to this option inside the terminal.

You need information about the OS you're running. For that you could use code like this:

public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        String nameOS = "os.name";        
        String versionOS = "os.version";        
        String architectureOS = "os.arch";
        System.out.println("\n    The information about OS");
        System.out.println("\nName of the OS: " + 
        System.getProperty(nameOS));
        System.out.println("Version of the OS: " + 
        System.getProperty(versionOS));
        System.out.println("Architecture of THe OS: " + 
        System.getProperty(architectureOS));
    }

Then for each OS you would have to use different invocations as described by Bala R and Mike Baranczak