timeout - How to sleep for five seconds in a batch file/cmd

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Answer 1

I'm very surprised no one has mentioned:

C:> timeout 5

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N.B. Please note however (thanks Dan!) that timeout 5 means:

Sleep anywhere between 4 and 5 seconds

This can be verified empirically by putting the following into a batch file, running it repeatedly and calculating the time differences between the first and second echos:

@echo off
echo %time%
timeout 5 > NUL
echo %time%