Echo off but messages are displayed

Question

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 1

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.

Answer 2

Save this as *.bat file and see differences

:: print echo command and its output echo 1  :: does not print echo command just its output @echo 2  :: print dir command but not its output dir > null  :: does not print dir command nor its output @dir c:\ > null  :: does not print echo (and all other commands) but print its output @echo off echo 3  @echo on REM this comment will appear in console if 'echo off' was not set  @set /p pressedKey=Press any key to exit