Commenting multiple lines in DOS batch file

Question

I have written huge MS DOS Batch file. To test this batch file I need to execute some lines only and want to hide/comment out remaining.

I have some existing comment

Answer 1

Another option is to enclose the unwanted lines in an IF block that can never be true

if 1==0 (
...
)

Of course nothing within the if block will be executed, but it will be parsed. So you can't have any invalid syntax within. Also, the comment cannot contain ) unless it is escaped or quoted. For those reasons the accepted GOTO solution is more reliable. (The GOTO solution may also be faster)

Update 2017-09-19

Here is a cosmetic enhancement to pdub's GOTO solution. I define a simple environment variable "macro" that makes the GOTO comment syntax a bit better self documenting. Although it is generally recommended that :labels are unique within a batch script, it really is OK to embed multiple comments like this within the same batch script.

@echo off
setlocal

set "beginComment=goto :endComment"

%beginComment%
Multi-line comment 1
goes here
:endComment

echo This code executes

%beginComment%
Multi-line comment 2
goes here
:endComment

echo Done

Or you could use one of these variants of npocmaka's solution. The use of REM instead of BREAK makes the intent a bit clearer.

rem.||(
   remarks
   go here
)

rem^ ||(
   The space after the caret
   is critical
)