check if command was successful in a batch file

Question

How within a batch file to check if command

start "" javaw -jar %~p0/example.jar

was successful or produced an error?

I want to use if/else statements to echo this info out.

Answer 1

This likely doesn't work with start, as that starts a new window, but to answer your question:

If the command returns a error level you can check the following ways

By Specific Error Level

commandhere
if %errorlevel%==131 echo do something

By If Any Error

commandhere || echo what to do if error level ISN'T 0

By If No Error

commandhere && echo what to do if error level IS 0

If it does not return a error level but does give output, you can catch it in a variable and determine by the output, example (note the tokens and delims are just examples and would likely fail with any special characters)

By Parsing Full Output

for /f "tokens=* delims=" %%a in ('somecommand') do set output=%%a
if %output%==whateveritwouldsayinerror echo error

Or you could just look for a single phrase in the output like the word Error

By Checking For String

commandhere | find "Error" || echo There was no error!
commandhere | find "Error" && echo There was an error!

And you could even mix together (just remember to escape | with ^| if in a for statement)

Hope this helps.