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I made up a batch file in Windows 10 to backup some of my data on USB and it works fine using Xcopy. I wanted to know how long it ran as I didn't set and watch, looking around I found this command"
set t2=%time: =0%. So I used replacing t2 with something more meaningful like start and end. set start=%time: =0%

My question is I don't understand what the : =0 after the time does? I open a cmd screen and entered echo %time: =0% or echo %time: =2% or just echo %time% and get the same format of time. Thought I would see a differences. Even though my batch file works fine and I get the time displayed just fine, I wonder what this : =0 does? I guess it comes from being an old computer programmer- long time retired. Use to program Assembly, COBOL, Fortran and sometimes even machine language or binary.

Just use Robocopy. It will tell you how long it ran.

Your other option is to use Dave's JTIMESTAMP.

But to answer your question. A blank is getting replaced with a zero. So if it is 9 am in the morning the time will display as 09:00 instead of 9:00. Date and Time manipulation has been discussed ad nauseum on this forum. If you search and read all the links you will find a wealth of information. You would be better off calling out to WMIC or Powershell to get the time and date in a consistent format because the DATE and TIME variables do not display the same on everyone's computers because of local and regional settings.

Thanks, I get it, current time is 22:48 so I did an echo %time:2=9% and it displayed 99:48:58:95 The place I found and copied that example (set start=%time: =0%) of time must have wanted the leading zero to do some math calculations. I just wanted to display current time, so could have just used echo %time%. I will search around as you suggested.