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

Answer 1

I was trying to do this from within an msbuild task, and choice and timeout both did not work due to I/O redirection.

I ended up using sleep.exe from http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils, which is nice because it doesn't require any install and it's tiny.

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Trying with choice:

<Target Name="TestCmd">
  <Exec Command="choice /C YN /D Y /t 5 " />
</Target>

Results in:

TestCmd:
  choice /C YN /D Y /t 5

EXEC : error : The file is either empty or does not contain the valid choices. [test.proj]
  [Y,N]?
C:\test.proj(5,9): error MSB3073: The command "choice /C YN /D Y /t 5 " exited with code 255.

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Trying with timeout:

<Target Name="TestCmd">
  <Exec Command="timeout /t 5 " />
</Target>

Results in:

TestCmd:
  timeout /t 5
EXEC : error : Input redirection is not supported, exiting the process immediately. [test.proj]
C:\test.proj(5,7): error MSB3073: The command "timeout /t 5 " exited with code 1.

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Aside:

I am actually using <Exec Command="sleep 2 & dbghost.exe" /> because I am executing dbghost.exe multiple times in parallel and it creates temp files/databases based on the current epoch time in seconds - which of course means if you start multiple instances, each uses the same temp name. I was originally trying to use MSBuild Extension Pack Thread.Sleep command, but it seems that (usually) it was running the sleep task fine, but then starting the <exec> task in all threads at the same time, and of course dbghost.exe would fail with conflicts. So far, using sleep.exe seems to be more reliable.

Answer 2

There is!

SLEEP <seconds>

If you want it in millisecond mode:

SLEEP -m <time in milliseconds>

This is more helpful than TIMEOUT because TIMEOUT can be aborted with a click of a key or CTRL + C (for TIMEOUT /t <secs> /nobreak). SLEEP cannot be aborted by anything (except for close button :p)

Other one is PING. But PING needs internet connection because you'll be recording the connection of a site.

Answer 3

SLEEP 5 was included in some of the Windows Resource Kits.

TIMEOUT 5 was included in some of the Windows Resource Kits, but is now a standard command in Windows 7 and 8 (not sure about Vista).

PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 5000 >NUL For any MS-DOS or Windows version with a TCP/IP client, PING can be used to delay execution for a number of seconds.

NETSH badcommand (Windows XP/Server 2003 only) or CHOICE

this link will help you more.

Answer 4

It can be done with two simple lines in a batch file: write a temporary .vbs file in the %temp% folder and call it:

echo WScript.Sleep(5000) >"%temp%\sleep.vbs"
cscript "%temp%\sleep.vbs"

Answer 5

This is the latest version of what I am using in practice for a ten second pause to see the output when a script finishes.

BEST>@echo done
BEST>@set DelayInSeconds=10
BEST>@rem Use ping to wait
BEST>@ping 192.0.2.0 -n 1 -w %DelayInSeconds%000 > nul

The echo done allows me to see when the script finished and the ping provides the delay. The extra @ signs mean that I see the "done" text and the waiting occurs without me being distracted by their commands.

I have tried the various solutions given here on an XP machine, since the idea was to have a batch file that would run on a variety of machines, and so I picked the XP machine as the environment likely to be the least capable.

GOOD> ping 192.0.2.0 -n 1 -w 3000 > nul

This seemed to give a three second delay as expected. One ping attempt lasting a specified 3 seconds.

BAD> ping -n 5 192.0.2.0 > nul

This took around 10 seconds (not 5). My explanation is that there are 5 ping attempts, each about a second apart, making 4 seconds. And each ping attempt probably lasted around a second making an estimated 9 seconds in total.

BAD> timeout 5
BAD> sleep /w2000
BAD> waitfor /T 180
BAD> choice

Commands not available.

BAD> ping 192.0.2.0 -n 1 -w 10000 > nul :: wait 10000 milliseconds, ie 10 secs

I tried the above too, after reading that comments could be added to BAT files by using two consecutive colons. However the software returned almost instantly. Putting the comment on its own line before the ping worked fine.

GOOD> :: wait 10000 milliseconds, ie 10 secs
GOOD> ping 192.0.2.0 -n 1 -w 10000 > nul

To understand better what ping does in practice, I ran

ping 192.0.2.0 -n 5 -w 5000

This took around 30 seconds, even though 5*5=25. My explanation is that there are 5 ping attempts each lasting 5 seconds, but there is about a 1 second time delay between ping attempts: there is after all little reason to expect a different result if you ping again immediately and it is better to give a network a little time to recover from whatever problem it has had.

Edit: stolen from another post, .. RFC 3330 says the IP address 192.0.2.0 should not appear on the internet, so pinging this address prevents these tests spamming anyone! I have modified the text above accordingly!

Answer 6

If you have an appropriate version of Windows and the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools, it includes a sleep command for batch programs. More at: http://malektips.com/xp_dos_0002.html