Sleep (Unix)

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The correct title of this article is sleep (Unix). The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

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.

1 Usage
- 1.1 Suffix
- 1.2 Options
2 Examples
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] 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.

[edit] Suffix

s (seconds)
m (minutes)
h (hours)
d (days)

[edit] Options

--help     display this help and exit
--version  output version information and exit

[edit] 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

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.

Possible uses for sleep include scheduling tasks and delaying execution to allow a process to start.

[edit] See also

Sleep (operating system)

[edit] External links

sleep(1): delay for a specified amount of time – Linux man page on usr-share-man.org

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