How to sleep for five seconds in a batch file/cmd [duplicate]

Answer 1

PING -n 60 127.0.0.1>nul

in case your LAN adapter is not available.

Answer 2

If you've got PowerShell on your system, you can just execute this command:

powershell -command "Start-Sleep -s 5"

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Edit: people raised an issue where the amount of time powershell takes to start is significant compared to how long you're trying to wait for. If the accuracy of the wait time is important (ie a second or two extra delay is not acceptable), you can use this approach:

powershell -command "$sleepUntil = [DateTime]::Parse('%date% %time%').AddSeconds(5); $sleepDuration = $sleepUntil.Subtract((get-date)).TotalMilliseconds; start-sleep -m $sleepDuration"

This takes the time when the windows command was issued, and the powershell script sleeps until 5 seconds after that time. So as long as powershell takes less time to start than your sleep duration, this approach will work (it's around 600ms on my machine).

Answer 3

On newer Windows OS versions you can use the command

sleep /w2000

in a DOS script (.cmd or .bat) to wait for 2s (2000 ms - substitute the time in ms you need). Be careful to include the /w argument - without it the whole computer is put to sleep! You can use -m instead of /m if you wish and optionally a colon (:) between the w and the number.

Answer 4

Timeout /t 1 >nul

Is like pause in 1 secound, you can take the limed to almost 100.000 (99.999) secounds. If you are connected to the internet the best solution would be:

ping 1.1.1.1. -n 1 -w 1000 >nul

When you ping you count in milliseconds, so one second would be 1000 milliseconds. But the ping command is a little iffy, it does not work the same way on offline machines. The problem is that the machine gets confused because it is offline, and it would like to ping a website/server/host/ip, but it can't. So i would recommend timeout. Good luck!

Answer 5

The following hack let's you sleep for 5 seconds

ping -n 6 127.0.0.1 > nul

Since ping waits a second between the pings, you have to specify one more than you need.

Answer 6

I'm very surprised no one has mentioned:

C:\> timeout 5

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N.B. Please note however (thanks Dan!) that timeout 5 means:

Sleep anywhere between 4 and 5 seconds

This can be verified empirically by putting the following into a batch file, running it repeatedly and calculating the time differences between the first and second echos:

@echo off
echo %time%
timeout 5 > NUL
echo %time%