How to wait in a batch script?

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

sleep 10

Does not make the batch file wait for 10 seconds.

I am running Windows XP.

**Note:** This is not a complete duplicate of [Sleeping in a batch file](

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) as the other question is about also about python, while this is about windows batch files.

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.)

I actually found the right command to use.. its called timeout:

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I used this

:top
cls
type G:\empty.txt
type I:\empty.txt
timeout /T 500
goto top

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

Well, does `sleep` even exist on your Windows XP box? According to this post:

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`sleep` isn't available on Windows XP, and you have to download the [Windows 2003 Resource Kit][1] in order to get it.

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

Try running `sleep 10` from a command prompt.

[1]:

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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](

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) 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.