SLEEP(1) - General Commands Manual #
SLEEP(1) - General Commands Manual
NAME #
sleep - suspend execution for an interval of time
SYNOPSIS #
sleep seconds
DESCRIPTION #
The sleep utility suspends execution for at least the given number of seconds. seconds must be a non-negative decimal value and may contain a fraction.
ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS #
SIGALRM
Terminate early, with a zero exit status.
EXIT STATUS #
The sleep utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
EXAMPLES #
Wait five seconds before running a command:
$ sleep 5; echo Hello, World!
List a file twice per second:
while ls -l file; do
sleep 0.5
done
SEE ALSO #
STANDARDS #
The sleep utility is compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”) specification.
Support for fractional seconds is an extension to that specification.
HISTORY #
A sleep utility first appeared in Version 4 AT&T UNIX.
This implementation of sleep first appeared in 4.3BSD-Tahoe.
OpenBSD 7.5 - July 30, 2022