REM ECHO OFF prevents the printing of each command to standard output.
@ECHO OFF
REM ECHO. prints a blank line.
ECHO.
ECHO Hello World, press any key to start APROGRAM.EXE!
PAUSE > NUL
REM The first argument to the batch file can be referenced with "%1"
APROGRAM.EXE %1
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO error
ECHO.
ECHO APROGRAM has finished whatever it was doing.
GOTO end
:error
ECHO.
ECHO Something went wrong with AProgram.
:end