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The following hack let's you sleep for 5 seconds
ping -n 6 127.0.0.1 > nul
Since ping waits a second between the pings, you have to specify one more than you need.
I was trying to do this from within an msbuild task, and choice and timeout both did not work due to I/O redirection.
I ended up using sleep.exe from http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils, which is nice because it doesn't require any install and it's tiny.
Trying with choice:
<Target Name="TestCmd">
<Exec Command="choice /C YN /D Y /t 5 " />
</Target>
Results in:
TestCmd:
choice /C YN /D Y /t 5
EXEC : error : The file is either empty or does not contain the valid choices. [test.proj]
[Y,N]?
C:\test.proj(5,9): error MSB3073: The command "choice /C YN /D Y /t 5 " exited with code 255.
Trying with timeout:
<Target Name="TestCmd">
<Exec Command="timeout /t 5 " />
</Target>
Results in:
TestCmd:
timeout /t 5
EXEC : error : Input redirection is not supported, exiting the process immediately. [test.proj]
C:\test.proj(5,7): error MSB3073: The command "timeout /t 5 " exited with code 1.
Aside:
I am actually using <Exec Command="sleep 2 & dbghost.exe" /> because I am executing dbghost.exe multiple times in parallel and it creates temp files/databases based on the current epoch time in seconds - which of course means if you start multiple instances, each uses the same temp name. I was originally trying to use MSBuild Extension Pack Thread.Sleep command, but it seems that (usually) it was running the sleep task fine, but then starting the <exec> task in all threads at the same time, and of course dbghost.exe would fail with conflicts. So far, using sleep.exe seems to be more reliable.