man/cat1p/sleep.1p.txt
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sleep(P) sleep(P)
NAME sleep - suspend execution for an interval SYNOPSIS sleep time DESCRIPTION The sleep utility shall suspend execution for at least the integral number of seconds specified by the time op- erand. OPTIONS None. OPERANDS The following operand shall be supported: time A non-negative decimal integer specifying the number of seconds for which to suspend execution. STDIN Not used. INPUT FILES None. ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES The following environment variables shall affect the execution of sleep: LANG Provide a default value for the internationaliza- tion variables that are unset or null. (See the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, Section 8.2, Internationalization Variables for the precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale cate- gories.) LC_ALL If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables. LC_CTYPE Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi- byte characters in arguments). LC_MESSAGES Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic mes- sages written to standard error. NLSPATH Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES . ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS If the sleep utility receives a SIGALRM signal, one of the following actions shall be taken: Terminate normally with a zero exit status. Effectively ignore the signal. Provide the default behavior for signals described in the ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS section of Utility Description Defaults . This could include terminating with a non- zero exit status. The sleep utility shall take the standard action for all other signals. STDOUT Not used. STDERR The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages. OUTPUT FILES None. EXTENDED DESCRIPTION None. EXIT STATUS The following exit values shall be returned: 0 The execution was successfully suspended for at least time seconds, or a SIGALRM signal was received. See the ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS section. >0 An error occurred. CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS Default. The following sections are informative. APPLICATION USAGE None. EXAMPLES The sleep utility can be 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 RATIONALE The exit status is allowed to be zero when sleep is interrupted by the SIGALRM signal because most implemen- tations of this utility rely on the arrival of that sig- nal to notify them that the requested finishing time has been successfully attained. Such implementations thus do not distinguish this situation from the successful completion case. Other implementations are allowed to catch the signal and go back to sleep until the requested time expires or to provide the normal signal termination procedures. As with all other utilities that take integral operands and do not specify subranges of allowed values, sleep is required by this volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 to deal with time requests of up to 2147483647 seconds. This may mean that some implementations have to make multiple calls to the delay mechanism of the underlying operating system if its argument range is less than this. FUTURE DIRECTIONS None. SEE ALSO wait , the System Interfaces volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, alarm(), sleep() COPYRIGHT Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2003 Edition, Standard for Information Technology -- Portable Operat- ing System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Speci- fications Issue 6, Copyright (C) 2001-2003 by the Insti- tute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.open- group.org/unix/online.html . POSIX 2003 sleep(P) |