Sleeping in a Batch File

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

One hack is to (mis)use the ping command:

ping 127.0.0.1 -n 6 > nul

Explanation:

ping is a system utility that sends ping requests. ping is available on all versions of Windows.
127.0.0.1 is the IP address of localhost. This IP address is guaranteed to always resolve, be reachable, and immediately respond to pings.
-n 6 specifies that there are to be 6 pings. There is a 1s delay between each ping, so for a 5s delay you need to send 6 pings.
> nul suppress the output of ping, by redirecting it to nul.

Sleeping in a batch file

UPDATE

The timeout command, available from Windows Vista and onwards should be the command used, as described in another answer to this question. What follows here is an old answer.

Old answer

If you have Python installed, or don't mind installing it (it has other uses too :), just create the following sleep.py script and add it somewhere in your PATH:

import time, sys

time.sleep(float(sys.argv[1]))

It will allow sub-second pauses (for example, 1.5 sec, 0.1, etc.), should you have such a need. If you want to call it as sleep rather than sleep.py, then you can add the .PY extension to your PATHEXT environment variable. On Windows XP, you can edit it in:

My Computer → Properties (menu) → Advanced (tab) → Environment Variables (button) → System variables (frame)

sleep function in a batch script

You can also use timeout.

Here is an example:

@echo off
echo Hi
timeout /t 1 /nobreak > nul

/t is not mandatory
1 is the amount of second(s) to wait
/nobreak ensures the user can't skip the wait
> nul redirects output to nothing, so you don't see anything

Batch Script - Wait 5 seconds before exec program

There are (at least) the following options, as others already stated:

To use the timeout command:
```
rem // Allow a key-press to abort the wait; `/T` can be omitted:
timeout /T 5
timeout 5
rem // Do not allow a key-press to abort the wait:
timeout /T 5 /NOBREAK
rem // Suppress the message `Waiting for ? seconds, press a key to continue ...`:
timeout /T 5 /NOBREAK > nul
```
Caveats:
- timeout actually counts second multiples, therefore the wait time is actually something from 4 to 5 seconds. This is particularly annoying and disturbing for short wait times.
- You cannot use timeout in a block of code whose input is redirected, because it aborts immediately, throwing the error message ERROR: Input redirection is not supported, exiting the process immediately.. Hence timeout /T 5 < nul fails.

To use the ping command:

rem /* The IP address 127.0.0.1 (home) always exists;
rem    the standard ping interval is 1 second; so you need to do
rem    one more ping attempt than you want intervals to elapse: */
ping 127.0.0.1 -n 6 > nul

This is the only reliable way to guarantee the minimum wait time. Redirection is no problem.

Sleep command in batch file?

I think the information here: http://malektips.com/xp_dos_0002.html would explain it better than I.

There's still the case of error handling though (what if the remote machine isn't up?). cmd.exe is quite useless for doing any remote activities for the most part, using powershell would enable so much more.

EDIT::

In fact, you can execute a program stored locally with psexec (it gets copied across and executed locally server-side) - would using that be a more viable alternative?

Without knowing what commands you're intending to run it's hard to take it much further.

EDIT(2)::

If it's just the one command you're running, simply store it in a dedicated file, like 'remote_dir_listing.cmd', and then use psexec with:

psexec \\server -u <user> -p <pass> -c -f remote_dir_listing.cmd

This will force a copy of the local file to the remote side each time you execute it (in case you want to expand it). In this way, you bypass the need for a pause at all - only when psexec has got the pipes open will it run, and once it completes, it closes itself silently.

Is it possible to pause a Batch Script with no message?

You can redirect the timeout output to the nul device:

timeout 10 > nul

Windows batch: sleep

You can try

ping -n XXX 127.0.0.1 >nul

where XXX is the number of seconds to wait, plus one.

How to wait in a batch script?

You can ping an address that doesn't exist and specify the desired timeout:

ping 192.0.2.2 -n 1 -w 10000 > nul

And since the address does not exist, it'll wait 10,000 ms (10 seconds) and return.

The -w 10000 part specifies the desired timeout in milliseconds.
The -n 1 part tells ping that it should only try once (normally it'd try 4 times).
The > nul part is appended so the ping command doesn't output anything to screen.

You can easily make a sleep command yourself by creating a sleep.bat somewhere in your PATH and using the above technique:

rem SLEEP.BAT - sleeps by the supplied number of seconds

@ping 192.0.2.2 -n 1 -w %1000 > nul

NOTE (September 2020): The 192.0.2.x address is reserved as per RFC 3330 so it definitely will not exist in the real world. Quoting from the spec:

192.0.2.0/24 - This block is assigned as "TEST-NET" for use in
documentation and example code. It is often used in conjunction with
domain names example.com or example.net in vendor and protocol
documentation. Addresses within this block should not appear on the
public Internet.