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Possible Duplicate:
Sleeping in a DOS batch file

I am trying to write a batch script and trying to wait 10 seconds between 2 function calls. 

sleep 10

does not wait for 10 seconds.

I am running Windows XP.

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4  
There is a duplicate at stackoverflow.com/questions/166044, "Sleeping in a DOS batch file". – Peter Mortensen Jul 29 '09 at 16:15
2  
@Peter: Some duplicates are never going to be resolved on this site. This includes sleep in batch, set foo = bar in batch, random being not random and other common mistakes. I think it's hopeless ;-) – Јοеу Feb 5 '11 at 19:46
3  
For those too lazy to read the post is stackoverflow mentioned by @peter-mortensen above: some Win-OS have 'chice', some have 'timeout' and some have none... – Gonen Aug 15 '12 at 5:43
Powershell can do it, if you have it installed - powershell -command "Start-Sleep -s 1" – Niall Connaughton May 29 at 0:03
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marked as duplicate by Peter Mortensen, marcog, Јοеу, dmckee, Alejandro Feb 5 '11 at 23:29

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7 Answers

up vote 95 down vote accepted

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

ping 192.0.2.2 -n 1 -w 10000 > nul

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

  • The -w 10000 part specifies the desired timeout in milliseconds.
  • The -n 1 part tells ping that it should only tries 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 use the above technique:

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

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

NOTE: 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.

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15  
Hack -2 Genius +3 – ojblass Apr 9 '09 at 18:12
1  
That's so crazy it might work. – Paul Tomblin Apr 9 '09 at 18:13
ping 127.0.0.1 -n 5 -w 1000 > nul hat to do it like this since the other would finish right away. – Thomaschaaf Apr 9 '09 at 18:58
@Thomaschaaf interesting... pinging a local machine address should've caused ping to return right away since it's pinging the same machine (i.e. time<1ms) so the timeout trick shouldn't have worked in that case! – chakrit Apr 9 '09 at 19:04
4  
I added the actual function its called timeout.. ss64.com/nt/timeout.html at least I know that others didn't know either :) – Thomaschaaf Apr 9 '09 at 19:42
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up vote 49 down vote

You'd better ping 127.0.0.1. Windows ping pauses for one second between pings so you if you want to sleep for 10 seconds, use

ping -n 11 127.0.0.1 > nul

This way you don't need to worry about unexpected early returns (say, there's no default route and the 123.45.67.89 is instantly known to be unreachable.)

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8  
I like this solution more than the the one marked as the answer because this is cleaner as we don't have to make sure that our script has a non-existent IP address. Therefore, we can write the script once and use it on any Windows system in any network without editing the script again. – Susam Jul 31 '12 at 11:34
This is the correct answer – Wouter Huysentruit May 28 at 7:36
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up vote 23 down vote

I actually found the right command to use.. its called timeout: http://www.ss64.com/nt/timeout.html

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alternative would be chakrits ss64.com/nt/sleep.html – Thomaschaaf Apr 9 '09 at 19:44
5  
Also not a Windows XP command... – Romulo Ceccon Apr 10 '09 at 0:10
3  
Now that WindowsXP is on the way out, it seems like this is really the way to do it in the future. – djangofan Feb 7 at 22:18
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up vote 16 down vote

I used this

:top
cls
type G:\empty.txt
type I:\empty.txt
timeout /T 500
goto top
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timeout is nice solution. Its in fact better than sleep. It tells time remaining! – Manish Jan 24 '11 at 10:01
2  
timeout command isn't available on Windows XP. It works on Windows 2003 and Windows 7 though. – Susam Jul 31 '12 at 11:32
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up vote 2 down vote

The blog post "Wait in Windows bat script - good way" has a number of ideas on how to best do this.

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up vote 1 down vote

What about:

@echo off
set wait=%1
echo waiting %wait% s
echo wscript.sleep %wait%000 > wait.vbs
wscript.exe wait.vbs
del wait.vbs
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up vote 1 down vote

Well, does sleep even exist on your Windows XP box? According to this post: http://malektips.com/xp_dos_0002.html sleep isn't available on Windows XP, and you have to download the Windows 2003 Resource Kit in order to get it.

Chakrit's answer gives you another way to pause, too.

Try running sleep 10 from a command prompt.

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