NAME

timer — run command at a specific interval

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The timer utility runs command at every interval.

The interval argument is a string containing non-negative decimal numbers including floats, terminated by suffixes: s for seconds, m for minutes, h for hours, d for days.
If the final number doesn't have a suffix, seconds are assumed. Longer durations are taken as out of scope.

If command exits with a non-zero status, timer exits with the same status, allowing to use service supervision to track failures.

OPTIONS

-c clockid

Set the clock to be used for the timer. The clockid argument can be set to one of the following shortcodes:

r

CLOCK_REALTIME (default)

m

CLOCK_MONOTONIC

b

CLOCK_BOOTTIME

ra

CLOCK_REALTIME_ALARM

ba

CLOCK_BOOTTIME_ALARM

t

CLOCK_TAI

See timer_create(3) for the behavior of each clock. Note that only CLOCK_REALTIME and CLOCK_MONOTONIC are portably defined in POSIX.1-2024.

-w

Wait for interval to elapse. Otherwise timer immediately runs command after starting.

EXIT STATUS

The timer utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

• Run munin-cron every 5 minutes: timer 5m munin-cron
• Print bell every minute and a half: timer 1m30s printf '\a'

SEE ALSO

at(1), crontab(1), sleep(1), timer_create(3)

AUTHORS

Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier <contact+cmd-timer@hacktivis.me>