TIP: Dos Sleep

I needed a batch file to sleep between starting up a couple of processes but dos doesn't support sleep. Google found me this result which gave me the idea but their solution is wrong.

The actual answer is this:

ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 10000 > nul

In this case we are pinging a non-existent IP address, once, and timing out in 10000 milliseconds.

Of coarse you could pop this into a sleep.bat to centralize it

cd c:\windows\system32
copy con sleep.bat
@echo off
ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w %1% > nul
ctrl-Z

Now you can just type "sleep 5000" to sleep for 5 seconds.

The actual resolution of this timer is one second or more. Any number less than one second is going to end up with a 1 second'ish delay.

The cost of this is one network ping with a standard 32 byte payload. The total message is 74 bytes on a Windows XP machine. This is low cost for a couple of sleeps in your program. If you want to do this all the time then you may want a less hackey solution.

The better solution might be to use the Windows Resource Kit which includes a sleep.exe command.