sleep

NAME

sleep - block for some number of seconds

SYNOPSIS

sleep EXPR

sleep

DESCRIPTION

Causes the script to sleep for EXPR seconds, or forever if no EXPR. May be interrupted by sending the process a SIGALRM. Returns the number of seconds actually slept. You probably cannot mix alarm() and sleep() calls, since sleep() is often implemented using alarm() .

On some older systems, it may sleep up to a full second less than what you requested, depending on how it counts seconds. Most modern systems always sleep the full amount.

For delays of finer granularity than one second, you may use Perl's syscall() interface to access setitimer(2) if your system supports it, or else see select below.