sleep infinity


 
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# 1  
Old 02-05-2010
sleep infinity

This might be one of the dumbest questions you've got, but please bear with me:

I am a UNIX beginner. I had an test today and I was asked the following question:

Q. How do you put the terminal into sleep indefinitely?

I didn't know the answer, but after I came home, I tried the following command:

Code:
sleep infinity

it seems that this command puts the terminal to sleep till infinity. (or until you close the terminal or interrupt with Ctrl+C)

I just wanted to know, if this works in other systems too and if there is any other way to sleep indefinitely
# 2  
Old 02-06-2010
Same behavior for me too..
# 3  
Old 02-06-2010
I'm pretty new to Unix myself, so I checked in the GNU Coreutils documentation, and there is no infinity option there.

My only thought is that sleep is reading "infinity" as a large integer, rather than as a string.
# 4  
Old 02-06-2010
Hi.

What happens when you try GNU sleep with successive characters from the string infinity ? ... cheers, drl
# 5  
Old 02-08-2010
'sleep inf' works as well. :-/

Everything else gives: sleep: invalid time interval '-infin'

Weird.
# 6  
Old 02-08-2010
GNU sleep accepts float numbers as argument. According to the POSIX specs, the literals "inf" or "infinity" are possible string representations of a float number.

See: POSIX specs at strtod

The same is true for the sleep builtin function in the kornshell 93 which also accepts floats as arguments.
# 7  
Old 02-08-2010
Hi.

An example c program is at http://users.tkk.fi/jhi/infnan.c ... cheers, drl
 
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