How do I comment on the Windows command line?
A comment is produced using the REM command which is short for "Remark".
REM Comment here...
The command you're looking for is rem
, short for "remark".
There is also a shorthand version ::
that some people use, and this sort of looks like #
if you squint a bit and look at it sideways. I originally preferred that variant since I'm a bash
-aholic and I'm still trying to forget the painful days of BASIC :-)
Unfortunately, there are situations where ::
stuffs up the command line processor (such as within complex if
or for
statements) so I generally use rem
nowadays. In any case, it's a hack, suborning the label infrastructure to make it look like a comment when it really isn't. For example, try replacing rem
with ::
in the following example and see how it works out:
if 1==1 (
rem comment line 1
echo 1 equals 1
rem comment line 2
)
You should also keep in mind that rem
is a command, so you can't just bang it at the end of a line like the #
in bash
. It has to go where a command would go. For example, the first line below outputs all hello rem a comment
but the second outputs the single word hello
:
echo hello rem a comment.
echo hello& rem a comment.
The second is two separate commands separated by &
, and with no spaces before the &
because echo will output those as well. That's not necessarily important for screen output but, if you're redirecting to a file, it may:
echo hello >file - includes the space.
echo hello>file - no space.