sleep — Suspend execution of a process for an interval of time
Format
sleep seconds
Description
sleep continues running until the specified number of seconds has elapsed. sleep can delay execution of a program or produce periodic execution in conjunction with shell commands.
The seconds argument can be either a number of seconds, or a more general time description of the form nhnmns, with the nh, nm, and the s being optional.
Examples
sleep 20h10mLocalization
sleep uses
the following localization environment variables:
- LANG
- LC_ALL
- LC_CTYPE
- LC_MESSAGES
- NLSPATH
See Localization for more information.
Exit values
- 0
- Successful completion
- 2
- Failure because you specified no seconds value or because seconds is an incorrect argument (for example, incorrect format).
Portability
POSIX.2, X/Open Portability Guide, UNIX systems.
Related information
date