Waits the specified amount of time before continuing.
Sleep, Delay
| Delay | The amount of time to pause (in milliseconds) between 0 and 2147483647 (24 days), which can be an expression. |
Due to the granularity of the OS's time-keeping system, Delay is typically rounded up to the nearest multiple of 10. For example, a delay between 1 and 10 (inclusive) is equivalent to 10 on most Windows NT/2000/XP systems. However, due to hardware differences, some systems will round up to a different value such as 15.
The actual delay time might wind up being longer than what was requested if the CPU is under load. This is because the OS gives each needy process a slice of CPU time (typically 20 milliseconds) before giving another timeslice to the script.
A delay of 0 yields the remainder of the script's current timeslice to any other processes that need it (as long as they are not significantly lower in priority than the script). Thus, a delay of 0 produces an actual delay between 0 and 20ms (or more), depending on the number of needy processes (if there are no needy processes, there will be no delay at all). However, a Delay of 0 should always wind up being shorter than any longer Delay would have been.
While sleeping, new threads can be launched via hotkey, custom menu item, or timer.
"Sleep -1": If the operating system is Windows NT4/2000/XP or later or AutoHotkey's version is 1.0.38.05 or later, a delay of -1 does not sleep but instead makes the script immediately check its message queue. This can be used to force any pending interruptions to occur at a specific place rather than somewhere more random. See Critical for more details.
SetKeyDelay, SetMouseDelay, SetControlDelay, SetWinDelay, SetBatchLines
Sleep, 1000 ; 1 second