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

User · Answer

echo off  is not ignored   echo off  means that you do not want the commands echoed  it does not say anything about the errors produced by the commands   The lines you showed us look okay  so the problem is probably not there  So  please show us more lines  Also  please show us the exact value of INSTALL PATH

User · Answer

echo off    quote the path or else it won t work if there are spaces in the path SET INSTALL PATH  c   etc etc  test   if exist  INSTALL PATH             echo 222

User · Answer

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  gt  null     does not print dir command nor its output  dir c    gt  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

User · Answer

As Mike Nakis said  echo off only prevents the printing of commands  not results   To hide the result of a command add  gt nul to the end of the line  and to hide errors add 2 gt nul   For example   Del  Q   tmp  gt nul 2 gt 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

User · Answer

For me this issue was caused by the file encoding format being wrong  I used another editor and it was saved as UTF-8-BOM so the very first line I had was  echo off but there was a hidden character in the front of it   So I changed the encoding to plain old ANSI text  and then the issue went away

[batch-file] Echo off but messages are displayed

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