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

One hack is to (mis)use the ping command:

ping 127.0.0.1 -n 6 > nul

Explanation:

• ping is a system utility that sends ping requests. ping is available on all versions of Windows.
• 127.0.0.1 is the IP address of localhost. This IP address is guaranteed to always resolve, be reachable, and immediately respond to pings.
• -n 6 specifies that there are to be 6 pings. There is a 1s delay between each ping, so for a 5s delay you need to send 6 pings.
• > nul suppress the output of ping, by redirecting it to nul.

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%