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how to use sleep or wait in a simple command execution

well, the obvious is to use “sleep.exe”. what if you don’t have it available? this is something i ran into today when i was on a server, needed to loop through a log and keep searching for a value… and didn’t want to sit around waiting.

simply, this was the command i was trying to get to run:

for /l %a in (1,1,5000) do find /i “failure” myLog.log & sleep 10

this didn’t work because sleep.exe wasn’t there. so, i did what any good internet citizen would do: google. i came up with this link: http://malektips.com/dos0017.html.

it gives a couple of examples using choice and ping. since choice was available, i decided to try this. my constructed command became:

for /l %a in (1,1,5000) do choice /t 10 /d y >nul & find /i “failure” myLog.log

now i get a 10 second delay between each loop. :)

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  1. Anonymous8/14/08, 10:00 PM

    Hey Marcus, this is Troy...Good Tip!!

    I found that there is a two (2) percent-symbols '%%a' instead of one. Also, I understand how a For...In...Do works in a batch-file, however, what is the reason for the three elements and the values you chose, inside the parethesis (e.g. 1,1,5000)?

    Thanks

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  2. Anonymous8/14/08, 10:09 PM

    Troy again...

    It just dawned on me why your example only has one percent-symbol (e.g. %a), as opposed to having two (e.g. %%a). When running directly on the command-line, you only need one percent-symbol. When running within a batch-file, you need two.

    Details, details...

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  3. Marcus Oh8/15/08, 9:18 AM

    hey troy! it was good seeing you at smug and nice hearing from you.

    yes, you're absolutely right. %% is required when for loops are handled inside of a batch file. i was simply running that from the cmd shell, searching for a certain condition to pop up.

    regarding the other question about (1,1,5000), when you use FOR /L you're specifying to step through a sequence of numbers. what's inside the parentheses breaks down to the following:

    1 - first # in sequence
    1 - indicates the # of steps
    5000 - last # in sequence

    so i'm telling it, do this starting from 1 until i get to 5000, and go 1 number at a time. switching the second value to 5, for example would step 5 numbers at a time.

    hope that helps...

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  4. Anonymous8/15/08, 5:36 PM

    Thanks for the explanation, Marcus!! I never knew you could do that...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous10/21/08, 12:35 AM

    for very long i was trin the cmd scripts....wel to make users in server no problum but to run some condition and the bigest help is the ping sweep....thanks a lot dude..u have been a big help...keep up the good work...:)

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