Sleep (Unix) 2896736 211095695 2008-05-08T19:39:46Z Ghettoblaster 6603820 {{lowercase}} '''sleep''' is a [[Unix]] [[command line]] program that [[sleep (operating system)|suspends]] program execution for a specified period of time. The sleep instruction suspends the calling [[process (computing)|process]] for at least the specified number of seconds (the default), minutes, hours or days. ==Usage== sleep '''number'''[suffix]... or: sleep option Where '''number''' is a required [[floating point]] number, and suffix is an optional suffix to indicate the time period. ===Suffix=== '''s''' (seconds) '''m''' (minutes) '''h''' (hours) '''d''' (days) ===Options=== '''--help''' display this help and exit '''--version''' output version information and exit ==Examples== sleep 5 Causes the current terminal session to wait 5 seconds. The default unit is seconds. sleep 5h Causes the current terminal session to wait 5 hours sleep 3h ; mplayer foo.mp3 Wait 3 hours then play foo.mp3 Note that '''<tt>sleep 5h30m</tt>''' and '''<tt>sleep 5h 30m</tt>''' are illegal since sleep takes only one value and unit as argument. However, '''<tt>sleep 5.5h</tt>''' is allowed. Possible uses for <tt>sleep</tt> include scheduling tasks and delaying execution to allow a process to start. ==See also== *[[Sleep (operating system)]] ==External links== *{{man|1|sleep|Linux|delay for a specified amount of time}} {{unix commands}} [[Category:Unix software]] [[pl:Sleep]] [[ru:Sleep]]