The sleep utility will suspend execution for at least the integral number of seconds specified by the time operand.
The following operands are supported:
time A non-negative decimal integer specifying the number of seconds for which to suspend execution.
Example 1: Suspending command execution for a time
To execute a command after a certain amount of time:
example% (sleep 105; command)&
Example 2: Executing a command every so often
example% while true
do
command
sleep 37
done
See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of sleep: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.
The following exit values are returned:
0 The execution was successfully suspended for at least time seconds, or a SIGALRM signal was received (see NOTES).
>0 An error has occurred.
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
| Availability | SUNWcsu |
| Interface Stability | Standard |
wait(1), alarm(2), sleep(3C), wait(3UCB), attributes(5), environ(5), standards(5)
If the sleep utility receives a SIGALRM signal, one of the following actions will be taken:
• Terminate normally with a zero exit status.
• Effectively ignore the signal.
The sleep utility will take the standard action for all other signals.