Name
echo
Synopsis
Display a string of text; turn command echoing on or off.
Syntax
echo [on | off | message
]
Description
Echo is typically used with other commands or in a batch file to display text on the screen. It’s also used to control command echoing from batch files.
The following options can be used with echo
:
-
on | off
By default, each command in a batch file is echoed to the screen as it is executed.
Echo on
andecho off
toggles this feature. To turn echoing off without displaying theecho off
command, use @echo off. The@
symbol in front of any command in a batch file prevents the line from being displayed.-
message
Types the message you’d like displayed to the console (screen).
Examples
To display an ordinary message, use the following:
echo Hello World!
To display a blank line, use one of the following (all equivalent):
echo. echo, echo"
(Note the absence of the space between the echo
command and the punctuation; you can also use a colon, semicolon,
square brackets, backslash, or forward slash.)
One handy use of echo
is to answer
y
to a confirmation prompt such as the one
del
issues when asked to delete all the files in a
directory. For example, if you wanted to clear out the contents of
the \temp
directory from a batch file, you could
use the following command:
echo y | del c:\temp\*.*
or even:
echo y | if exists c:\temp\*.* del c:\temp\*.*
This construct works because the pipe character takes the output of the first command and inserts it as the input to the second.
Announce ...
Get Windows XP in a Nutshell now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.