25. Delaying

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25.1 `sleep`: Delay for a specified time

sleep pauses for an amount of time specified by the sum of the values of the command line arguments. Synopsis:

sleep number[smhd]…

Each argument is a number followed by an optional unit; the default is seconds. The units are:

`s': seconds
`m': minutes
`h': hours
`d': days

Historical implementations of sleep have required that number be an integer, and only accepted a single argument without a suffix. However, GNU sleep accepts arbitrary floating point numbers (using a period before any fractional digits).

The only options are `--help' and `--version'. See section Common options.

Due to shell aliases and built-in sleep command, using an unadorned sleep interactively or in a script may get you different functionality than that described here. Invoke it via env (i.e., env sleep …) to avoid interference from the shell.

An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.