I showed the sleep
command earlier, let's look at that in much more detail. In general, the sleep
command is used to introduce a delay in the script. For example, in the previous script if I had not used sleep
the output would have scrolled off too quickly to see what was going on.
The sleep
command takes a parameter indicating how long to make the delay. For example, sleep 1
means to introduce a delay of one second. Here are a few examples:
sleep 1 # sleep 1 second (the default is seconds) sleep 1s # sleep 1 second sleep 1m # sleep 1 minute sleep 1h # sleep 1 hour sleep 1d # sleep 1 day
The sleep
command actually has a bit more capability that what is shown here. For more information, please consult the man
page (man sleep
).