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, because 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 if your system supports it, or else see select() below.

See also the POSIX module's sigpause function.