Unfortunately, I still have the occasional need to write a batch file that has to run on generic XP. And on such occassions, sometimes I want the script – if we can call it that – to wait for a couple of seconds at some point. Alas, XP has no sleep or similar command, but there is a way to simulate the functionality. I found the gist of this idea at Rob van der Woude’s Scripting Pages, and truth be told cannot believe I had never seen or thought of this before. The core idea is to use a number of ping commands to localhost.
So for example, I wanted to kill some Documentum Desktop processes that integrate with the explorer.exe task that makes up the Windows desktop interface. But, I wanted it to pause for a moment before relaunching explorer; ping to the rescue. Here is the batch file I ended up creating for the purpose.
@echo off rem rem Kills core Documentum Desktop processes and restarts Explorer so they relaunch rem taskkill /f /im dcathmgr.exe /im dcevtsrv.exe /im explorer.exe rem tasklist /nh |sort rem --- the next line just delays for a moment ping -n 3 localhost >nul start explorer.exe
The second-to-last line simply pings localhost 3 times, buying a couple of seconds of delay. You can adjust the number of times upward if you want it to wait a little longer. Normally the pings will be separated by a second, but the last attempt will terminate the ping command line so you really want number of seconds + 1, e.g. -n 6 would wait about 5 seconds.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
