(MS-DOS) Time Delays

Question

I came past a few ways to cause a time delay such as pings and dirs. Though none of them are really precise, is there anny proper way to cause a time delay?

I heard about a few things though they don't work on all computers, not on my Windows XP nor the Windows NT at college.

It takes ages going through all files on Google finding a good answer, and since I didn't yet find the question on Stack Overflow I thought it might be good to just create the question myself ;)

Answer 1

Sleep

It will allow you to do this.

Answer 2

<warning>This is a hack</warning>

Use your favorite programming language (other than MS-DOS batch) and create an application which takes one argument, the number of milliseconds to wait, then, simply call this program from a batch file to sleep the required amount.

As far as I know, this is the only reliable way to do it in DOS.