On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, mcclnx mcc wrote: > we have Redhat 5.5 on server. Recently we tried to use "sleep" command on > batch job script some sleep work but some not sleep. any one have ideal? > > ==== sample program === > > #/bin/bash > set -v > > program1 > sleep 30 > program2 > sleep 60 > program3 > sleep 40 > ... sleep doesn't just sleep for a set number of seconds, it sleeps for up to that many seconds or until signalled. Is it possible that these sleep processes are being signalled by some other process? I've known a cluster scheduler to send excessive signals to running processes. You'd expect to see something on stderr in that case as far as I know, but depending on how this is being run you might not be capturing that. jh