Echo and Output

The ECHO command prints text to the console -- echo Hello World! displays exactly that. By default, cmd.exe also echoes (displays) each command line itself right before running it, which can clutter a script's output with technical noise the end user doesn't need to see. Adding @echo off as the very first line of a script suppresses this command-echoing behavior for the rest of the file, so only text you deliberately print with ECHO appears.

You can also suppress echoing on a single line, even while the rest of the script has command echoing turned on, by prefixing just that line with @. This gives fine-grained control: use @ECHO OFF globally for a clean baseline, then let specific ECHO statements be the only visible output, effectively building a deliberate, user-facing interface for what would otherwise be a wall of raw commands.

There's a classic gotcha with ECHO: typing plain ECHO with no arguments doesn't print a blank line -- it instead reports back whether command echoing is currently ON or OFF. To print an actual blank line, you need ECHO. or ECHO/ instead. Beyond that, characters like &, |, ^, <, and > carry special meaning to cmd.exe and must be escaped with a caret (^) to be printed or used literally, for example echo Save 50%% off (percent signs need doubling in some contexts too).

Output doesn't have to go to the console at all -- it can be redirected. > sends a command's output to a file, overwriting whatever was there before; >> appends to the end of the file instead. 2> redirects just the error stream, and 2>&1 merges the error stream into the standard output stream, commonly used when logging both to the same file. To discard output entirely, redirect it to the special NUL device, as in command >nul 2>&1, which is a common way to silence a noisy command that only matters for its exit code.