I agree that's more elegant than ping, but it;s not available in Windows NT 4, 2000 and XP except from a reskit.
Right! It was pulled from NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP for some undisclosed resewn. At one time I wrote my own version of the SLEEP program. It worked for me, but I never did any real testing to see if it messed up anything.
Doing a time delay in windows has some potential problems. You do not want to shut off other things working in the background. If you grab the hardware timer, you make it unavailable to other things that might need the the hardware timer. Apparently Microsoft resolved such things when thy released Windows 7. The Windows 7 program CHOICE does not run in XP.
There is no elegant method in Windows XP that has Microsoft approval. One could use Powershell for a delay, but for many that is overkill.
For what it is worth, here is a relevant posting about time delay in XP.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1672338/how-to-sleep-for-5-seconds-in-windowss-command-prompt-or-dosSomebody noted you can get the choice command from Windows 95 or 98.