This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux implementation of this interface
Contents
Application Usage
None.
Asynchronous Events
If the sleep utility receives a SIGALRM signal, one of the following actions shall be taken:
1. Terminate normally with a zero exit status.
2. Effectively ignore the signal.
3. Provide the default behavior for signals described in the ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS section of Section1.4,
UtilityDescriptionDefaults. This could include terminating with a non-zero exit status.
The sleep utility shall take the standard action for all other signals.
Consequences Of Errors
Default.
Thefollowingsectionsareinformative.Copyright
Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard
for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base
Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright (C) 2018 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy between this version and the original
IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document.
The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .
Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most likely to have been introduced
during the conversion of the source files to man page format. To report such errors, see
https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .
IEEE/The Open Group 2017 SLEEP(1POSIX)
Description
The sleep utility shall suspend execution for at least the integral number of seconds specified by the
time operand.
Environment Variables
The following environment variables shall affect the execution of sleep:
LANG Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See the
Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section8.2, InternationalizationVariables for the
precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale
categories.)
LC_ALL If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization
variables.
LC_CTYPE Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters
(for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).
LC_MESSAGES
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic
messages written to standard error.
NLSPATH Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES.
Examples
The sleep utility can be used to execute a command after a certain amount of time, as in:
(sleep 105; command) &
or to execute a command every so often, as in:
while true
do
command
sleep 37
done
Exit Status
The following exit values shall be returned:
0 The execution was successfully suspended for at least time seconds, or a SIGALRM signal was
received. See the ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS section.
>0 An error occurred.
Extended Description
None.
Future Directions
None.
Input Files
None.
Name
sleep — suspend execution for an interval
Operands
The following operand shall be supported:
time A non-negative decimal integer specifying the number of seconds for which to suspend execution.
Options
None.
Output Files
None.
Prolog
This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux implementation of this interface
may differ (consult the corresponding Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or the interface
may not be implemented on Linux.
Rationale
The exit status is allowed to be zero when sleep is interrupted by the SIGALRM signal because most
implementations of this utility rely on the arrival of that signal to notify them that the requested
finishing time has been successfully attained. Such implementations thus do not distinguish this
situation from the successful completion case. Other implementations are allowed to catch the signal and
go back to sleep until the requested time expires or to provide the normal signal termination procedures.
As with all other utilities that take integral operands and do not specify subranges of allowed values,
sleep is required by this volume of POSIX.1‐2017 to deal with time requests of up to 2147483647 seconds.
This may mean that some implementations have to make multiple calls to the delay mechanism of the
underlying operating system if its argument range is less than this.
See Also
wait
The Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter8, EnvironmentVariables
The System Interfaces volume of POSIX.1‐2017, alarm(), sleep()
Stderr
The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.
Stdin
Not used.
Stdout
Not used.
Synopsis
sleep time