Using time.Sleep() in Go

Basic Usage of time.Sleep()

You can use time.Sleep() to pause your program for a predetermined amount of time, similar to most programming languages.

First, you should know that the time package has useful constants that allow you to conveniently specify time in units.

const (
    Nanosecond Duration = 1
    Microsecond = 1000 * Nanosecond
    Millisecond = 1000 * Microsecond
    Second = 1000 * Millisecond
    Minute = 60 * Second
    Hour = 60 * Minute
)

They’re accessed with the time.<Constant> notation. (e.g. time.Second)

You can use these constants with the time.Sleep() function. For example, if we want to pause execution for 1 second, we can write the following code:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    fmt.Println("one second will pass between this message...")
    time.Sleep(time.Second)
    fmt.Println("...and this message")
}

We can do some multiplication with time.Second to pause a program for 30 seconds:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    fmt.Println("30 seconds will pass between this message...")
    time.Sleep(time.Second * 30)
    fmt.Println("...and this message")
}

You can do multiplication with all of the other constants mentioned as well.

Examples

Here are some more examples using the other constants.

Sleep for 500 milliseconds

package main

import (
    "time"
)

func main() {
    time.Sleep(time.Millisecond * 500)
}

Sleep for 10 seconds

package main

import (
    "time"
)

func main() {
    time.Sleep(time.Second * 10)
}

Sleep for 5 minutes

package main

import (
    "time"
)

func main() {
    time.Sleep(time.Minute * 5)
}

Sleep for 2 hours

Not really sure why you would use this, but just know it’s possible.

package main

import (
    "time"
)

func main() {
    time.Sleep(time.Hour * 2)
}

References

• https://pkg.go.dev/time

My main motivation for writing this is that I think the official documentation is way too dense and doesn’t show several examples of time.Sleep(). I just needed some examples to understand the syntax and move on with my day.