What does “@” mean in Windows batch scripts

Question

I saw @ is used in such contexts:

@echo off

@echo start eclipse.exe

What does @ mean here?

Answer 1

The @ disables echo for that one command. Without it, the echo start eclipse.exe line would print both the intended start eclipse.exe and the echo start eclipse.exe line.

The echo off turns off the by-default command echoing.

So @echo off silently turns off command echoing, and only output the batch author intended to be written is actually written.