SummaryThis paper investigates the cooperative containment control problem for discrete‐time multi‐agent systems with general linear dynamics. Distributed containment control protocols on the basis of state feedback design and output feedback design are proposed. Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented for both the state feedback and output feedback cases, which are less conservative than those in the literature. These conditions depend on the spectral properties of the topology matrix. Then, effective algorithms are proposed to obtain control gain matrices for both cases based on H ∞ type Riccati design. Simulation examples are provided finally to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design methods. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.