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), but it says -bash: syntax error near unexpected token '1'. How can it be done?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

And what about:

read -p "Press enter to continue"

Answer 3

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 4

I realize that I'm a bit late with this, but you can also call sleep and pass the disired time in. For example, If I wanted to wait for 3 seconds I can do:

/bin/sleep 3

4 seconds would look like this:

/bin/sleep 4

Answer 5

Run multiple sleeps and commands

sleep 5 && cd /var/www/html && git pull && sleep 3 && cd ..

This will wait for 5 seconds before executing the first script, then will sleep again for 3 seconds before it changes directory again.

Answer 6

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

sleep 120

Answer 7

Within the script you can add the following in between the actions you would like the pause. This will pause the routine for 5 seconds.

read -p "Pause Time 5 seconds" -t 5
read -p "Continuing in 5 Seconds...." -t 5
echo "Continuing ...."

Answer 8

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

for more info check read manpage ref 1, ref 2

Answer 9

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 10

use trap to pause and check command line (in color using tput) before running it

trap 'tput setaf 1;tput bold;echo $BASH_COMMAND;read;tput init' DEBUG

press any key to continue

use with set -x to debug command line