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

you can include @ in a 'scriptBlock' like this:

@(
  echo don't echoed
  hostname
)
echo echoed

and especially do not do that :)

for %%a in ("@") do %%~aecho %%~a