Question

I was wondering about the maximum length of a label in a batch file.

I found this Microsoft article stating:

MS-DOS recognizes only the first eight characters of a batch file label; subsequent characters are ignored.

They also provide an example :

@echo off
goto latestch
:latestchanges
echo two
:latestch
echo three

which is supposed to output

two
three

instead of

three

But on my system, I get

three

I tried on Windows 7 (6.1.7600) and WindowsXP (5.1.2600), and get the same result on both of them.

It looks to me there is no eight characters limitation!
Am I missing something?

Answer 1

The limits are 2047 and 8192, depending on your OS. See this KB article.