Ndtyjky

If you do any programming, it would probably be trivial to create a small C executable that calls Sleep() to pause the thread for a specified timeout. However, it stands to reason you are not the first person to need such a tool.

Some very quick googling turned up this page: https://www.computerhope.com/dutil.htm which, if you scroll down, offers a Sleep.exe that will work on MS-DOS 5.x or higher. I am not endorsing this page or the Sleep.exe utility it hosts; if it deletes your hard drive, don't blame me. ;-)

tl;dr you can create a tiny text file, and use a tiny comes-with-DOS utility to do this.

There's a lovely utility called DEBUG.COM which I believe is included in every version of DOS, that lets you turn assembly language instructions into machine code, shove them into memory, and execute them. It's very lightweight—early versions of DEBUG were about 7kb ;)

The BIOS provides a "system call" to get current system time; details are here or here. So you can construct a loop that checks this over and over until a certain number of seconds have passed.

Here is how you do it:

A

xor ax, ax  ; zero out ax

int 1a      ; timer -> DX

mov bx, dx  ; initial timer value -> BX

hlt         ; don't waste CPU cycles

xor ax, ax  ; zero out ax

int 1a      ; timer -> DX

sub dx, bx  ; elapsed time -> DX

cmp dx, 222 ; THIS IS IN HEX! 0x222 = 546 == 30 seconds * 18.2 ticks per second

jl 0106     ; if not enough elapsed time repeat loop

ret ; return control to DEBUG.COM



U 0100 0120

G =0100

q

Save this to a file (e.g. DELAY.TXT) and put the following into your AUTOEXEC.BAT:

DEBUG <DELAY.TXT

This will assemble and run the code every time you boot.

The U command is just for debugging purposes - it disassembles what previously went into RAM. You can remove it. The A command actually does the assembly, and the G command means "go".

Adjust the 222 to however much time you need. It is in hex, and needs to be the number of seconds * 18.2 because that is the clock frequency.

This method allows you to add any functionality you want—break on keyboard input, keep trying to open a network file in a loop, display a countdown timer... there's an interrupt (BIOS or DOS function) for reading from the keyboard, another for reading a file, another for printing a string.

I'm not sure if the version of the NET command you're using returns meaningful error codes, but if it does you can use something like this in your AUTOEXEC.BAT:

net logon samba mypassword /yes

if NOT ERRORLEVEL 1 goto :noerror

net logon samba mypassword /yes

if NOT ERRORLEVEL 1 goto :noerror

net logon samba mypassword /yes

if NOT ERRORLEVEL 1 goto :noerror

:noerror

Repeat the first two lines as many times as necessary to ensure enough attempts are made.

There's a DOS version of perl 4 that fits on a floppy. It is the handiest thing.

Perl is a scripting language designed to replace and extend shell scripting on Unix, which is itself more powerful than shell scripting in DOS (such as autoexec.bat). You can use for just that, except it's literally designed to save you from that moment where you say "I can't quite do this in shell". When you need a little more, it extends and extends clear up into a proper computing language. Perl 5 even has OO.

Obviously C:perl4perl.exe -e "sleep 10" is no trouble at all, but you can do a lot of other stuff.

Once, we were doing a network rollout with 50 machines with Win3.1 and a third party IP stack or WFW3.11, the former did not support DHCP, so IP addresses were hardcoded into /wherever/etc/hosts. It was on me to change all the config and hosts files. On the same weekend as an unmissable festival. I used perl 4 to make a boot floppy that would find and read the config and hosts file, and rewrite it with corrected IPs. Gave my staff 20 of those disks... and said "power up the machine with this floppy in". Made sure they all could boot a floppy. I was sure it would work, and it did. Great festival!

Many DOS PCs have the Norton Utilities suite of software installed. Norton Utilities includes a program called "Batch Enhancer" (BE.EXE) that includes a number of facilities for use from batch files, including delays.

If you have this utility, you can add a delay like this:

BE DELAY nn

where nn is the length of the delay in units of 1/18.2 of a second.

What I actually would try is to check if the device you're connecting to is available.

You can try something like this:

:reset

ping 127.0.0.1



IF NOT ERRORLEVEL 1 net logon samba mypassword /yes



IF ERRORLEVEL 1 goto :reset

This way, it will ping the machine until it is available and will try to mount the share.

If it fails, it will keep trying until it mounts successfully.

This way, the autoexec.bat won't do anything else until the required server is up and guarantees that the share is mounted.

This means that, if, for example, the Pi takes 2-3 more seconds to boot (due to, say, updates or whatever), the share will still mount.

You don't need to guestimate how long it will take to boot and have the service started in the Pi.

One thing you can also do, with this method, is to count how many times the net logon command failed and ask for a decision or abort with a message to run the command later.

I used to (ab)use PING.exe to solve this, I'm not aware of any Windows without this.

ping 127.0.0.1 -w 1000 -n 3 > null

Oops just read the question and notice -n is ignored. Obviously you could put it into a FOR loop and deal with multiples of 4.