computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

, sleep is a

command Command may refer to: Computing * Command (computing), a statement in a computer language * command (Unix), a Unix command * COMMAND.COM, the default operating system shell and command-line interpreter for DOS * Command key, a modifier key on A ...

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

and other

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s that suspends program execution for a specified time.

Overview

The sleep instruction suspends the calling

process A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic. Things called a process include: Business and management * Business process, activities that produce a specific s ...

for at least the specified number of seconds (the default), minutes, hours or days. for

systems is part of the

X/Open X/Open group (also known as the Open Group for Unix Systems and incorporated in 1987 as X/Open Company, Ltd.) was a consortium founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standards in the field of info ...

Portability Guide since issue 2 of 1987. It was inherited into the first version of POSIX and the

Single Unix Specification The Single UNIX Specification (SUS) is a standard for computer operating systems, compliance with which is required to qualify for using the "UNIX" trademark. The standard specifies programming interfaces for the C language, a command-line shell, ...

. It first appeared in

Version 4 Unix Research Unix refers to the early versions of the Unix operating system for PDP-7, DEC PDP-7, PDP-11, VAX and Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 computers, developed in the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center (CSRC). The term ''Research Unix'' first ...

. The version of sleep bundled in

GNU GNU ( ) is an extensive collection of free software (394 packages ), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popu ...

coreutils The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a collection of GNU software that implements many standard, Unix-based shell commands. The utilities generally provide POSIX compliant interface when the environment variable is set, but otherwise offers ...

was written by Jim Meyering and Paul Eggert. The command is also available in the

OS-9 OS-9 is a family of real-time, process-based, multitasking, multi-user operating systems, developed in the 1980s, originally by Microware Systems Corporation for the Motorola 6809 microprocessor. It was purchased by Radisys Corp in 2001, a ...

shell, in the

KolibriOS KolibriOS is an open-source operating system for x86 computers, written completely in FASM assembly language. It has been developed since 2004, forked from MenuetOS, and supports i586 CPU, CPUs or newer. KolibriOS is small sized and fits on a sin ...

Shell, and part of the

FreeDOS FreeDOS (formerly PD-DOS) is a free software operating system for IBM PC compatible computers. It intends to provide a complete MS-DOS-compatible environment for running Legacy system, legacy software and supporting embedded systems. FreeDOS ca ...

''Package group Utilities''. The FreeDOS version was developed by Trane Francks and is licensed under the GPL. A sleep command is also part of

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

's ''MSX-DOS2 Tools'' for

MSX-DOS MSX-DOS is a discontinued disk operating system developed by Microsoft's Japan subsidiary for the 8-bit home computer standard MSX, and is a cross between MS-DOS v1.25 and CP/M-80 v2.2. MSX-DOS MSX-DOS and the extended BASIC with 3½-in ...

version 2. In

PowerShell PowerShell is a shell program developed by Microsoft for task automation and configuration management. As is typical for a shell, it provides a command-line interpreter for interactive use and a script interpreter for automation via a langu ...

, sleep is a predefined command alias for the Start-Sleep

cmdlet PowerShell is a shell program developed by Microsoft for task automation and configuration management. As is typical for a shell, it provides a command-line interpreter for interactive use and a script interpreter for automation via a langu ...

which serves the same purpose.

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

also provides a sleep resource kit tool for

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

which can be used in

batch file A batch file is a Scripting language, script file in DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows. It consists of a series of Command (computing), commands to be executed by the command-line interpreter, stored in a plain text file. A batch file may contain a ...

s or the

command prompt A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternativ ...

to pause the execution and wait for some time. Another native version is the timeout command which is part of current versions of Windows. The command is available as a separate package for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

as part of the

UnxUtils UnxUtils is a collection of utility programs that provide popular Unix-based shell commands ported from GNU implementations as native Windows programs that depend only on Win32 and the Microsoft C- runtime ( msvcrt.dll). The collection wa ...

collection of

native Native may refer to: People * '' Jus sanguinis'', nationality by blood * '' Jus soli'', nationality by location of birth * Indigenous peoples, peoples with a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory ** Nat ...

Win32 The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is the foundational application programming interface (API) that allows a computer program to access the features of the Microsoft Windows operating system in which the program is running. Programs can acces ...

ports Ports collections (or ports trees, or just ports) are the sets of makefiles and Patch (Unix), patches provided by the BSD-based operating systems, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, as a simple method of installing software or creating binary packages. T ...

of common GNU Unix-like utilities. The command has also been ported to the

IBM i IBM i (the ''i'' standing for ''integrated'') is an operating system developed by IBM for IBM Power Systems. It was originally released in 1988 as OS/400, as the sole operating system of the IBM AS/400 line of systems. It was renamed to i5/OS in 2 ...

operating system.

Usage

sleep number Where number is an integer number to indicate the time period in seconds. Some implementations support

floating point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some base) multiplied by an integer power of that base. Numbers of this form ...

numbers.

Options

None.

Examples

sleep 30 Causes the current terminal session to wait 30 seconds. sleep 18000 Causes the current terminal session to wait 5 hours

GNU sleep

sleep 3h ; mplayer foo.mp3 Wait 3 hours then play the file Note that sleep 5h30m and sleep 5h 30m are illegal since sleep takes only one value and unit as argument. However, sleep 5.5h (a floating point) is allowed. Consecutive executions of sleep can also be used. sleep 5h; sleep 30m Sleep 5 hours, then sleep another 30 minutes. The

GNU Project The GNU Project ( ) is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and Computer hardware, computing dev ...

's implementation of sleep (part of

) allows the user to pass an arbitrary floating point or multiple arguments, therefore sleep 5h 30m (a space separating hours and minutes is needed) will work on any system which uses GNU sleep, including

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. Possible uses for sleep include scheduling tasks and delaying execution to allow a process to start, or waiting until a shared network connection most likely has few users to

wget GNU Wget (or just Wget, formerly Geturl, also written as its package name, wget) is a computer program that retrieves content from web servers. It is part of the GNU Project. Its name derives from "World Wide Web" and " ''get''", a HTTP reque ...

a large file.

References

External links

* * * {{Windows commands Unix SUS2008 utilities Unix process- and task-management-related software Plan 9 commands Inferno (operating system) commands IBM i Qshell commands Microcomputer software