waitFor

Waitfor is a term used in computing to denote a control that suspends or delays program execution until a specified condition is met or a given time elapses. It is often used to implement synchronization, pacing, or delayed actions in scripts, queries, and applications.

In SQL Server, WAITFOR is a Transact-SQL statement that can pause the execution of a batch, procedure, or trigger. It has several variants:

- WAITFOR DELAY 'hh:mm:ss' — pauses for a specified duration.

- WAITFOR TIME 'hh:mm:ss' — suspends until a specific time of day.

- In Service Broker contexts, WAITFOR can be used with a RECEIVE operation to wait for a message from a queue, optionally with a TIMEOUT.

In Windows batch scripting, WAITFOR is a command that pauses a batch file until a named event or a message on a named pipe is signaled, or until an optional timeout occurs. It is commonly used for simple interprocess synchronization.

In general programming, waitfor or its variant wait_for refers to utilities, libraries, or language constructs that wait for a condition to become true or for an asynchronous operation to complete. Common approaches include polling loops with timeouts or language-supported asynchronous primitives (such as promises or futures) that suspend execution until a result is available.

See also: sleep, delay, timeout, sleep functions in various languages.