Brb founding a SaaS startup. I’ll call it cloudsleep dot io of course. After our Series B I’ll buy the .com.

Only task to do before lining up investors is how can I weave AI into our product?

Retries won’t work in that case. Would be better to have two endpoints: get the time in x seconds and wait until time passed. That way retrying the wait endpoint will work fine and if time hasn’t elapsed it can just curl itself with the same arguments.

If you have curl (but not sleep) sure, but if not maybe you can use bash's wacky /dev/tcp. The microservice could listen on ports 1 through 64k to let you specify how many seconds to sleep.

    while wait && [[ $SECONDS -lt $1 ]]; do
      read -t $(($1 - SECONDS))
    done <><(:)

although if you're not too concerned about finishing early if a signal interrupts, probably

    { wait; read -t $1; } <><(:)

would be fine. You want the wait because otherwise bash won't reap the zombie from the process substitution until after the read times out.

Interestingly, it does reap on a blocked read without -t, so potentially the behaviour on -t would be considered a bug rather than as-designed.

There's also a loadable sleep builtin supplied with bash which calls into the internal fsleep() so should be reliable and without forking.

It's just all hacks. It should use `sleep`, period.

Sleeping is an OS scheduling task. Use the OS syscall that does that.

As is suggested on the Github issue that Microsoft has been ignoring for half a year.