5 Easy Commands To Delay A Batch File In Windows

timeout /t [/nobreak] To pause for 30 seconds and prevent the user from interrupting the pause with a keystroke, you’d enter timeout /t 30 /nobreak. The user will see Waiting for 30 seconds, press CTRL+C to quit . . . To delay 100 seconds and allow the user to interrupt the delay, you’d use timeout /t 100. The user will see Waiting for 100 seconds, press a key to continue . . . To delay indefinitely until a user enters a keystroke, use timeout /t -1. The user will see Press any key to continue … If you don’t want to display a message to the user during the delay, add >nul to the end of your timeout command.

You might use pause right before a section of the batch file that you might not want to process, or before providing instructions to the user to insert a disk before continuing. [2] X Research source At the pause, you can stop the batch program completely by pressing Ctrl + C and then Y.

ping /n 1 /w localhost >nul Ping has many more available flags, but for the purpose of delaying a batch file, you’ll only need to use a few. In this case, we’ll ping ourselves by using localhost as our destination. To pause quietly for 10 seconds, you’d use ping /n 1 /w 10000 localhost >nul

choice [/c [<…>]] [/n] [/cs] [/t /d ] [/m ] /c <…>: Specifies the choices you’d like to create, which can include a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and ASCII characters 128-254. /t : Use this flag to specify how many seconds to wait before the default choice is selected. You can set this value to any number between 0 (which instantly selects the default choice) and 9999. /d : Specifies the default choice from the list of choices created with /c. /n (optional): hides the list of choices, but still allows the user to select one. /m (optional): displays a message before the choice list. If you don’t include this flag but don’t hide the choice list, the choices will still be displayed. /cs (optional): This specifies that choices are case-sensitive, which is important if you want to assign different functions to capital and lowercase letters. To create a delay with CHOICE without displaying a message or forcing the user to choose something, use rem | choice /c:AB /T:A,30 >nul. This command simply delays the batch file for 30 seconds (similar to using Timeout with no message), provides no choices to the user, and continues after the delay. You can replace 30 with any value up to 9999 (in seconds). [3] X Research source

sleep The sleep command only requires the number of seconds you want to delay the batch file. For example, to wait 30 seconds before continuing, you’d use sleep 30.