osf1 man page for sleep

sleep(1)						      General Commands Manual							  sleep(1)

NAME
       sleep - Suspends execution for at least the specified time

SYNOPSIS
       sleep seconds

STANDARDS
       Interfaces documented on this reference page conform to industry standards as follows:

       sleep:  XCU5.0

       Refer to the standards(5) reference page for more information about industry standards and associated tags.

OPTIONS
       None

OPERANDS
       Non-negative integer specifying the number of seconds for which execution is to be suspended.

DESCRIPTION
       The  sleep  command suspends execution of a process for at least the interval specified by seconds, which can range from 0 to 2,147,483,647
       seconds.  Depending on system activity, the actual time of suspension may be longer.  See the sleep(3) reference page.

       [Tru64 UNIX]  seconds can be entered as a non-negative decimal, octal, or hexadecimal value.

NOTES
       If sleep receives a SIGALARM signal before process execution has resumed, sleep takes one of the  following  actions:  Terminates  normally
       with a 0 (zero) exit status.  (See the sleep(3) reference page for more information.)  Ignores the signal Performs default processing

EXIT STATUS
       The  following  exit  values  are  returned: Execution was successfully suspended for at least the requested time, or a SIGALARM signal was
       received.  An error occurred.

EXAMPLES
       To display a message at 4-minute intervals for 20 minutes, create a shell script called remind containing the following:

	      for i do sleep 240; echo $i sleep 240; echo $i sleep 240; echo $i sleep 240; echo $i sleep 240; echo $i done

	      To display the message Try calling NHK at 4-minute intervals, enter: remind 'Try calling NHK' To run a command at regular intervals,
	      create a shell script containing the following:

	      while true do
		      date
		      sleep 60 done

	      This  displays  the date and time once a minute.	To execute a command after a specified interval, enter the following; (sleep 3600;
	      echo Time's up) &

	      This displays the message "Time's up" after one hour.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
       The following environment variables affect the execution of sleep: Provides a default value for the internationalization variables that are
       unset or null. If LANG is unset or null, the corresponding value from the default locale is used.  If any of the internationalization vari-
       ables contain an invalid setting, the utility behaves as if none of the variables had been defined.  If set to a  non-empty  string  value,
       overrides  the  values of all the other internationalization variables.	Determines the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes
       of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multibyte characters in arguments).  Determines the locale for the  for-
       mat  and  contents  of  diagnostic messages written to standard error.  Determines the location of message catalogues for the processing of
       LC_MESSAGES.

SEE ALSO
       Commands:  wait(1)

       Functions:  alarm(3), pause(3), sigaction(2), sleep(3)

       Standards:  standards(5)

																	  sleep(1)