alarm(1tcl)

alarm -- send SIGALARM in specified number of seconds

Synopsis

alarm seconds

Description

Instructs the system to send a SIGALRM signal in the specified number of seconds. This is a floating point number, so fractions of a section may be specified. If seconds is 0.0, any previous alarm request is canceled. Only one alarm at a time may be active; the command returns the number of seconds left in the previous alarm. On systems without the setitimer system call, seconds is rounded up to an even number of seconds.