Why “The system cannot find the batch label specified” is thrown even if label exists?

Question

While running a batch file in Windows XP I have found randomly occurring error message:

The system cannot find the batch label specified name_of_label

Answer 1

Little different use case ...

I was calling a bat script during packer build of Windows Server 2012 Server, using the shell provisioner (OpenSSH). Now, the script was working fine through cmd in the provisioned Virtual Machine (put breakpoint in packer build to stop and confirmed this) ... but, it was failing with these call labels not found issues.

The Line Endings were fine, CRLF (confirmed in Notepadd++). The script was working fine through command line as well. What more, sometimes, it just use to run fine and sometime fail, but once failed for some label, the failure was consistent.

Initially, I just started removing the subroutines altogether by expanding the call itself and putting subroutine code inline. I did this for all instances where there was only one call (no code duplication).

But, yeah, i did stumble upon one sub which was called from 3,4 places. After trying everything, this is what worked for me

Adding 8-10 REM statements just above the subroutine. Yes, I am not kidding !!

PS : The script is very very old, but management needed me to make that work through packer (we have a Day-2 plan of this to replace it with Ansible/Chef).