netbsd man page for sleep

SLEEP(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						  SLEEP(1)

NAME
     sleep -- suspend execution for an interval of time

SYNOPSIS
     sleep seconds

DESCRIPTION
     The sleep utility suspends execution for a minimum of seconds.  It is usually used to schedule the execution of other commands (see EXAMPLES
     below).

     Note: The NetBSD sleep command will accept and honor a non-integer number of specified seconds.  This is a non-portable extension, and its
     use will nearly guarantee that a shell script will not execute properly on another system.

     When the SIGINFO signal is received, the estimate of the amount of seconds left to sleep is printed on the standard output.

EXIT STATUS
     The sleep utility exits with one of the following values:

     0	   On successful completion, or if the signal SIGALRM was received.

     >0    An error occurred.

EXAMPLES
     To schedule the execution of a command for 1800 seconds later:

	   (sleep 1800; sh command_file >& errors)&

     This incantation would wait half an hour before running the script command_file.  (See the at(1) utility.)

     To reiteratively run a command (with csh(1)):

	   while (1)
		   if (! -r zzz.rawdata) then
			   sleep 300
		   else
			   foreach i (*.rawdata)
				   sleep 70
				   awk -f collapse_data $i >> results
			   end
			   break
		   endif
	   end

     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
     courteously by sleeping for 70 seconds in between each awk job.

SEE ALSO
     at(1), nanosleep(2), sleep(3)

STANDARDS
     The sleep command is expected to be IEEE Std 1003.2 (``POSIX.2'') compatible.

BSD
								  August 13, 2011							       BSD