How do I pause my shell script for a second before continuing?
BashShellUnixBash Problem Overview
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?
Bash Solutions
Solution 1 - Bash
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
Solution 2 - Bash
And what about:
read -p "Press enter to continue"
Solution 3 - Bash
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
Solution 4 - Bash
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.
Solution 5 - Bash
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
Solution 6 - Bash
On Mac OSX, sleep does not take minutes/etc, only seconds. So for two minutes,
sleep 120
Solution 7 - Bash
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 ...."
Solution 8 - Bash
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
Solution 9 - Bash
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
Solution 10 - Bash
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