Echo off but messages are displayed

batch-file cmd echo
Aleksandr Kravets picture Aleksandr Kravets · Jan 11, 2012 · Viewed 329k times · Source

I turned off echo in bat file.

@echo off

then I do something like this

...
echo %INSTALL_PATH%
if exist %INSTALL_PATH%(
echo 222
...
)

and I get:

The system cannot find the path specified.

message between those two echos.

What can be the reason of this message and why message ignores echo off?

Answer

Hand-E-Food picture Hand-E-Food · Jan 11, 2012

As Mike Nakis said, echo off only prevents the printing of commands, not results. To hide the result of a command add >nul to the end of the line, and to hide errors add 2>nul. For example:

Del /Q *.tmp >nul 2>nul

Like Krister Andersson said, the reason you get an error is your variable is expanding with spaces:

set INSTALL_PATH=C:\My App\Installer
if exist %INSTALL_PATH% (

Becomes:

if exist C:\My App\Installer (

Which means:

If "C:\My" exists, run "App\Installer" with "(" as the command line argument.

You see the error because you have no folder named "App". Put quotes around the path to prevent this splitting.

Related questions

How do I make a Windows batch script completely silent?

There has been variants of this question asked for generations, but despite writing some quite complicated Windows scripts, I can't seem to find out how to make them actually silent. The following is an excerpt from one of my current …

Read More
How to echo "2" (no quotes) to a file, from a batch script?

How do I echo the number 2 into a file, from a batch script? This doesn't work: Echo 2>> file.txt because 2>> is a special command. :(

Read More
Batch file and DEL errorlevel 0 issue

The batch has to remove files and directories from specific locations and output success or stdout/stderr messages to a new .txt file. I have created the most of the script and it performs exactly as it should, except when …

Read More