NAME

sleep − suspend execution for an interval

SYNOPSIS

sleep time

DESCRIPTION

Sleep suspends execution for time seconds.  It is used to execute a command after a certain amount of time as in:

(sleep 105; command)&

or to execute a command every so often, as in:

while true
do
command
sleep 37
done

EXAMPLE

label:

command >> x
command >> x
date >> x
sleep 10
goto label

The preceding sh(1) script would execute the two commands and append the results to file "x", then sleep for 10 seconds and repeat the process.

SEE ALSO

alarm(2), sleep(3C). 

BUGS

Time must be less than 65536 seconds. 

Version 3.6  —  December 20, 1987