Windows 7 – How do I make a batch file wait / sleep for some seconds?

I use a batch file to start up a few of the programs I need running in the background. Up until now, I had used the pause command to execute it after some of the other start-ups finished. I would prefer to use the wait or sleep commands but they do not appear to be included in Windows 7.

Anybody know how to put those commands back in, or a different method that achieves the same results?

Solution:

There are many sleep utilities you can download and drop into your System32 folder, one is provided with the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit called sleep.exe.

You can also use the ping trick:

:sleepping 127.0.0.1 -n 2 -w 1000 > NULping 127.0.0.1 -n %1 -w 1000 > NUL

then from somewhere in your batch file, you can call it like so:

CALL :sleep 1