The version of `sleep` I was using on a particular ARM device didn't
have fractional second support.

I could have sworn that I had tried fractional seconds in Ubuntu
before and it didn't work... but it seems to work now.

AJ ONeal


On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Jan L. Peterson
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Jan 26, 2011, at 11:22 AM, AJ ONeal wrote:
>> I don't know about y'all, but I often find cases where I wish I had msleep 
>> in bash.
>
> Just curious... what are some cases where you need this functionality?  
> Precision timing would be hard to do in a shell script due to the startup 
> overhead of your program, but I can see times when pauses on the order of a 
> half- or quarter-second could be useful.
>
> Interestingly enough, sleep(1) on my Mac says it accepts a fractional value 
> (i.e. sleep 0.5).  The man page on my Ubuntu system doesn't mention this, but 
> it still seems to work:
>
> linux_bash$ date +%s.%N; sleep 0.5; date +%s.%N
> 1296067377.322561535
> 1296067377.825704857
>
> Sadly, the date command on the Mac doesn't understand %N, so I have to fake 
> it with perl:
> darwin_bash$ alias hrtime="perl -e 'use Time::HiRes qw(time); print time, 
> \"\n\";'"
> darwin_bash$ hrtime; sleep 0.5; hrtime
> 1296068112.03389
> 1296068112.55211
>
> Looks like the overhead is acceptable for sleeps longer than 1/100 of a 
> second or so, on modern hardware, at least.
>
>        -jan-
> --
> Jan L. Peterson
> http://www.peterson-tech.com/~jlp/
>
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