Batch mode causes Maven to not display “Progress: 125/150kB” style lines when running. If you are running Maven on some server and then checking the logs afterwards, these progress lines take up 90% of the log and make it basically impossible to find the stuff that matters. Setting batch mode prevents this. Apart from that, I don’t know any other use for batch mode. As others have said, I have never seen Maven prompt for anything during a build, regardless of whether interactive or batch mode is set.