How to Supress Prompts & Responses from commands in Batch Files

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Commands such as deleting all files can complicate batch files because the system prompts for confirmation.

For example check the following command

del *.* replies with *.*, Are you sure (Y/N)?

Now if you don’t want to display prompt By using echo this will automatically reply for you

echo y | del *.*

or

del /q *.*

To supress the “File Not Found” error when trying to delete files from an empty directory, use this code instead:

if exist *.* echo y| del *.*

or

if exist *.* | del /q *.*

During the execution of your batch files, users can see your commands on the screen. Most of the time this is good for debugging purposes; however, often it’s better to run your batch file silently.

Solution 1

Any command that is followed by “> nul” will not be shown on the screen. The greater sign directs the output to null (nowhere).

For example, copy *.* *.bak will show you as it copies all the files in the directory and renames them with the bak extension.

copy *.* *.bak > nul will silently complete its work without placing anything on the screen.

Solution 2

It will redirect STDOUT to null. Errors will still be displayed. As an example, run dir badfile.txt >nul and you will still see “File not found” displayed. That’s because errors are written to STDERR

To redirect STDERR to nul as well, try this:

dir badfile.txt > nul 2>&1

Of course you may want to see the errors. So a better tack to take could be to write to a log file

dir badfile.txt >log.txt 2>&1