Question

So, I was wondering if there was a bash command that lets me fork a process which sleeps for several seconds, then executes a command.

Here’s an example:

sleep 30 'echo executing...' &

^This doesn’t actually work (because the sleep command only takes the time argument), but is there something that could do something like this? So, basically, a sleep command that takes a time argument and something to execute when the interval is completed? I want to be able to fork it into a different process then continue processing the shell script.

Also, I know I could write a simple script that does this, but due to some restraints to the situation (I’m actually passing this through a ssh call), I’d rather not do that.

Answer 1

You can invoke another shell in the background and make it do what you want:

bash -c 'sleep 30; do-whatever-else' &

The default interval for sleep is in seconds, so the above would sleep for 30 seconds. You can specify other intervals like: 30m for 30 minutes, or 1h for 1 hour, or 3d for 3 days.