Quick and dirty Message Box from command line

If you are building a tool chain that is primarily command line scripting, but you need to alert the user to a problem, the simplest built-in Windows method is to use VBScript and the msgbox command.

Create a one line file whose name ends in *.VBS (failmsg.vbs for example), and contains something like this:

msgbox "Build failed. Please check Log files"

then in your scripts (ie a BAT file), call the vbs file using

cscript /nologo failmsg.vbs

You could also pass parameters to the vbs script, but since I know nothing about vbs except what you just saw, I don't know how.