If there are two or more numbers included, the system will wait for the amount of time equivalent to the sum of those numbers.įor example, sleep 2m 30s will create a pause of 2 and a half minutes. It is also possible to use more than one argument with the sleep command. Other Unix-like operating systems will likely support the following units of time: On some types of machines (namely BSD systems and MacOS,) the only unit of time supported is seconds. Sleep's default unit of time is seconds, which is why we don't have to specify a unit in the examples above. That's it for the basic usage of the sleep command! What to Keep in Mind When Using the Sleep Command Similarly, you could use a floating point number to represent fractions of seconds. The result of this script will look like this: This will pause your script for N seconds, with N being either a positive integer or a floating point number.Ĭonsider this basic example: echo 'Hello there!'Įcho 'Oops! I fell asleep for a couple seconds!' Sleep is a very versatile command with a very simple syntax. To do this, you can use the very straightforward sleep command. For example, you might want the script to wait while a process completes or before retrying a failed command. When you're writing a shell script, you may find that you need it to wait a certain number of seconds before proceeding.

Mac sleep command terminal