Tick is a simple timer utility for the command line. Think of it as an improved sleep.

The only dependency is a Go installation. To install tick, run this command:

go install github.com/qsymmachus/tick

Running tick -help will print usage guidelines:

Usage of tick:
  -m int
    	Number of minutes the timer should run.
  -q	Quiet mode, suppresses countdown.
  -qq
    	Extra quiet mode, suppresses countdown and bell.
  -s int
    	Number of seconds the timer should run.

You can use tick as general purpose timer. By default, tick displays a countdown and rings your terminal bell when it's complete.

Run timer for 25 minutes and 10 seconds:

tick -m 25 -s 10

You can suppress the countdown output with the -q flag. It will still ring the terminal bell when it's done.

Let's send this tick to the background with & so we can run other commands while it runs:

tick -m 5 -q &

If you want to suppress the countdown and the bell, use the -qq flag. In this mode, tick works the same way as sleep:

tick -s 3 -qq

An implementation of sleep sort using tick:

#!/bin/bash

function sleeper() {
  tick -qq -s $1
  echo $1
}

while [ -n "$1" ]
do
  sleeper $1 &
  shift
done
wait