sleep is a Unix command line program that suspends program execution for a specified period of time. The sleep instruction suspends the calling process for at least the specified number of seconds (the default), minutes, hours or days.
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Usage
sleep number[suffix]... or: sleep option
Where number is a required floating point number, and suffix is an optional suffix to indicate the time period.
Suffix
s (seconds) m (minutes) h (hours) d (days)
Options
--help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit
Examples
sleep 5
Causes the current terminal session to wait 5 seconds. The default unit is seconds.
sleep 5h
Causes the current terminal session to wait 5 hours
sleep 3h ; mplayer foo.mp3
Wait 3 hours then play foo.mp3
Note that sleep 5h30m and sleep 5h 30m are illegal since sleep takes only one value and unit as argument. However, sleep 5.5h is allowed. Consecutive executions of sleep can also be used.
sleep 5h; sleep 30m
Sleep 5 hours, then sleep another 30 minutes.
Linux implementation of sleep allows to pass multiple arguments, therefore sleep 5h 30m will work on this system (note that a space separating hours and minutes is needed).
Possible uses for sleep include scheduling tasks and delaying execution to allow a process to start.
See also
External links
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