The NUL device is useful for supressing "Press any key to continue"

Long time scripters will, I'm sure, know this. Useful to mention as I was writing a script over the long weekend (it was memorial day here in the US yesterday - makes up for the many UK bank holidays I've missed over the past couple of months!) which needed a "pause" in it, but as this was for a non-tech savvy user, I wanted to indicate that they could also press Control-C to terminate the script there and then.

If you have test.cmd with the following contents:

@echo off
echo Example 1
echo Press any key to continue or Control-C to terminate script . . .
pause

the output won't be quite what you may want:

C:\>test
Example 1
Press any key to continue or Control-C to terminate script . . .
Press any key to continue . . .

To resolve this, simply add a > NUL onto the second pause:

@echo off
echo Example 2
echo Press any key to continue or Control-C to terminate script . . .
pause > NUL

to give the following output.

C:\>test
Example 2
Press any key to continue or Control-C to terminate script . . .

Cheers,
John.

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