sleep invocation (GNU Coreutils 9.0)
25.1 sleep: Delay for a specified time
sleep
pauses for an amount of time specified by the sum of the values of the command line arguments. Synopsis:
sleep number[smhd]…
Each argument is a non-negative number followed by an optional unit; the default is seconds. The units are:
- ‘
s
’ - seconds
- ‘
m
’ - minutes
- ‘
h
’ - hours
- ‘
d
’ - days
Although portable POSIX scripts must give sleep
a single non-negative integer argument without a suffix, GNU sleep
also accepts two or more arguments, unit suffixes, and floating-point numbers in either the current or the C locale. See Floating point.
For instance, the following could be used to sleep
for 1 second, 234 milli-, 567 micro- and 890 nanoseconds:
sleep 1234e-3 567.89e-6
Also one could sleep indefinitely like:
sleep inf
The only options are --help
and --version
. See Common options.
Due to shell aliases and built-in sleep
functions, using an unadorned sleep
interactively or in a script may get you different functionality than that described here. Invoke it via env
(i.e., env sleep …
) to avoid interference from the shell.
An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.