How do I pause my shell script for a second before continuing?

Question

I have only found how to wait for user input. However, I only want to pause so that my while true doesn\'t crash my computer.

I tried pause(1)

Answer 1

You can make it wait using $RANDOM, a default random number generator. In the below I am using 240 seconds. Hope that helps @

> WAIT_FOR_SECONDS=`/usr/bin/expr $RANDOM % 240` /bin/sleep
> $WAIT_FOR_SECONDS

Answer 2

On Mac OSX, sleep does not take minutes/etc, only seconds. So for two minutes,

sleep 120

Answer 3

And what about:

read -p "Press enter to continue"

Answer 4

In Python (question was originally tagged Python) you need to import the time module

import time
time.sleep(1)

or

from time import sleep
sleep(1)

For shell script is is just

sleep 1

Which executes the sleep command. eg. /bin/sleep

Answer 5

read -r -p "Wait 5 seconds or press any key to continue immediately" -t 5 -n 1 -s

To continue when you press any one button

Answer 6

Use the sleep command.

Example:

sleep .5 # Waits 0.5 second.
sleep 5  # Waits 5 seconds.
sleep 5s # Waits 5 seconds.
sleep 5m # Waits 5 minutes.
sleep 5h # Waits 5 hours.
sleep 5d # Waits 5 days.

One can also employ decimals when specifying a time unit; e.g. sleep 1.5s