Terminal Sleep Command

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You want to schedule something really quickly, and you don’t have time to set up cron or other scheduling tools. In some cases, using the sleep command in Terminal might be all you need.

Here’s an example. My Mac was busy doing something, and I didn’t want Dropbox working on a big sync until it was done. So I quit Dropbox and entered this in Terminal:

sleep 3600; open -a Dropbox

The sleep command had my Mac wait for 60 minutes before launching Dropbox. The other job had finished and Dropbox launched and went to work. More on using Terminal to launch applications.

Of course there are other ways to schedule tasks. But could you implement them faster for this particular scenario?

Related:
scheduling a twitter tweet
running an applescript with iCal
terminal as application launcher

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