NAME sleep -- suspend execution for a specified time SYNOPSIS sleep [--help] [--version] seconds DESCRIPTION The sleep command continues running until the specified number of seconds has elapsed. sleep can delay execution of a program or produce periodic execution in conjunction with shell commands. The seconds argument can be either a number of seconds or a more general time description of the form nhnmns, with nh, nm, and s being optional. The maximum sleep duration is 2,147,483,647 seconds, which works out to 596,523 hours, 14 minutes and 7 seconds. That, I think, should be just about long enough for anybody. ;-) OPTIONS sleep accepts the following options: --help /? * displays help and exits successfully. When this option is used, sleep does not suspend execution. This option cannot be used with other options. * Note: sleep checks for the switchar defined in DOS. If you have set a different switchar in DOS, sleep will honour your preferred setting. --version /v * displays version and exits successfully. When this option is used, sleep does not suspend execution. This option cannot be used with other options. * Note: sleep checks for the switchar defined in DOS. If you have set a different switchar in DOS, sleep will honour your preferred setting. EXAMPLES sleep 360 sleeps for 360 seconds sleep 5m sleeps for 5 minutes sleep 1h15m30s sleeps for 1 hour, 5 minutes, 30 seconds DIAGNOSTICS Possible exit status values are: 0 Successful completion. 2 Failure because seconds value was not specified or is invalid.