Multi-Line Comments in Batch File

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Multi-Line Comments in Batch File

The DOS/Windows batch language may not be as powerful as UNIX shell scripting language, but you can still get a lot of things done with it. The batch language only supports single line comments with the "rem" keywoard, which stands for remark. So to comment out the following example, you'd have to put the "rem" keywoard in front of every line:

rem if exist "%distroFile%" (
rem   copy "%distroFile%" "%tmpDir%"
rem ) else (
rem   echo *** %distroFile% does not exist!
rem )

Well, that's a lot of work. As you can see in the example above, that's five line and a lot of typing. And you'd have to change the cursor position for every line. Don't you wish there is a C or Java-like multi-line comment (/* */) sequence?

Well, you can comment out multi-line statements by surrounding them with a goto and a label. The same example above would be changed to the following:

goto :comment1
if exist "%distroFile%" (
  copy "%distroFile%" "%tmpDir%"
) else (
  echo *** %distroFile% does not exist!
)
:comment1

The goto statement will skip all of the statement below until it gets to the ":comment1" label. You'll just have to use a different label for each comment clause. Now, isn't that easier?

Chieh Cheng
Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:21:24 +0000

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