.\" Copyright (c) 1990 The Regents of the University of California.
.\" %sccs.include.redist.man%
.\" @(#)sleep.1 6.4 (Berkeley) %G%
.Nd suspend execution for an interval of time
suspends execution for a minimum of
is used to schedule the execution of other commands (see
utility exits with one of the following values:
On successful completetion, or if the signal SIGALRM was received.
To schedule the execution of a command for
.Dl (sleep 1800; sh command_file >& errors)&
This incantation would wait a half hour before
running the script command_file. (See the
To reiteratively run a command (with the
if (! -r zzz.rawdata) then
foreach i (`ls *.rawdata`)
awk -f collapse_data $i >> results
The scenario for a script such as this might be: a program currently
running is taking longer than expected to process a series of
files, and it would be nice to have
another program start processing the files created by the first
program as soon as it is finished (when zzz.rawdata is created).
The script checks every five minutes for the file zzz.rawdata,
when the file is found, then another portion processing
is done curteously by sleeping for 70 seconds in between each
The sleep function is expected to be POSIX 1003.2 compatible.