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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T17:34:55+00:00

I like to have a final PAUSE in my *.bat scripts so I can

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I like to have a final PAUSE in my *.bat scripts so I can just double click on them in Windows explorer and have the chance to read the output. However, the final PAUSE is an annoyance when I run the same script from the command line.

Is there any way to detect whether we are running the script from a command prompt (or not) and insert the PAUSE (or not) accordingly?

(Target environment is Windows XP and greater.)

Update

I’ve managed to compose this from Anders’s answer:

(((echo.%cmdcmdline%)|find /I "%~0")>nul)
if %errorlevel% equ 0 (
    set GUI=1
) else (
    set CLI=1
)

Then, I can do stuff like this:

if defined GUI pause
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    @echo off
echo.Hello World
(((echo.%cmdcmdline%)|find /I "%~0")>nul)&&pause

    …NT+ only, no %cmdcmdline% in Win9x probably.

    As pointed out by E M in the comments, putting all of this on one line opens you up to some edge cases where %cmdcmdline% will escape out of the parenthesis. The workaround is to use two lines:

    @echo off
echo.Hello World

echo.%cmdcmdline% | find /I "%~0" >nul
if not errorlevel 1 pause
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