cynchronised sleep capbilty..

[Joe Kelsey]

On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 11:35 -0800, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> :I often find myself wanting to write shell scripts that do:
> :
> :...
> :
> :while:
> :do
> : 	report results
> : 	sleep -until_next 10
> :done
> :
> :
> :I have inplemented something like this with a crude
> :shell function that sleeps up to 9 seconds to get to
> 
>     I think integrating such an option into /bin/sleep is an excellent idea.
>     I have had need for such a feature myself on occassion.

Note that ksh93 has an external command interface which allows the
addition of user-defined discipline functions and builtin commands which
could allow for these sort of options.

> :thirdly: is it worth making sleep a shell builtin?
> :running sleep(1) every time is a lot of work for what
> :we need.
> :
> :julian
> 
>     I don't think this is necessary.

sleep is a ksh93 builtin command.

ksh93 also now has a new license the OSI Common Public License, instead
of the old ATT-specific license.  Also, Glenn Fowler and David Korn seem
very open to ideas such as this.

/Joe