Thank you all for your helpful comments! Does anyone think that this situation merits a sentence in the Command Grouping section, stating that labels shouldn't be used in a command group? Tx, John

Thanks, Charles, but I'm not convinced. :) Your explanation doesn't account for the error I got when removing the "goto end" statement. And it doesn't explain the behavior of this script: if "%1" == "help" ( echo MARK 1 echo MARK 2 :foobar echo MARK 3 ) Script invocation: > test2 help MARK...

Consider this batch program, stored in "test.btm": @echo off if "%1" == "" goto helplabel if "%1" == "help" ( :helplabel echo this echo is echo helpful goto end ) :end With CMD.EXE, both "test" and "test help" produce the...