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SLEEP(1)                  BSD General Commands Manual                 SLEEP(1)

NAME
     sleep -- suspend execution for an interval of time

SYNOPSIS
     sleep seconds

DESCRIPTION
     The sleep utility suspends execution for a minimum of seconds.  It is
     usually used to schedule the execution of other commands (see EXAMPLES
     below).

     Note: The NetBSD sleep command will accept and honor a non-integer number
     of specified seconds.  This is a non-portable extension, and its use will
     nearly guarantee that a shell script will not execute properly on another
     system.

     When the SIGINFO signal is received, the estimate of the amount of
     seconds left to sleep is printed on the standard output.

EXIT STATUS
     The sleep utility exits with one of the following values:

     0     On successful completion, or if the signal SIGALRM was received.

     >0    An error occurred.

EXAMPLES
     To schedule the execution of a command for 1800 seconds later:

           (sleep 1800; sh command_file >& errors)&

     This incantation would wait half an hour before running the script
     command_file.  (See the at(1) utility.)

     To reiteratively run a command (with csh(1)):

           while (1)
                   if (! -r zzz.rawdata) then
                           sleep 300
                   else
                           foreach i (*.rawdata)
                                   sleep 70
                                   awk -f collapse_data $i >> results
                           end
                           break
                   endif
           end

     The scenario for a script such as this might be: a program currently
     running is taking longer than expected to process a series of files, and
     it would be nice to have another program start processing the files
     created by the first program as soon as it is finished (when zzz.rawdata
     is created).  The script checks every five minutes for the file
     zzz.rawdata, when the file is found, then another portion processing is
     done courteously by sleeping for 70 seconds in between each awk job.

SEE ALSO
     at(1), nanosleep(2), sleep(3)

STANDARDS
     The sleep command is expected to be IEEE Std 1003.2 ("POSIX.2")
     compatible.

BSD                             August 13, 2011                            BSD

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | EXIT STATUS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | STANDARDS