bup-tick(1)

💖 bup-tick — wait for up to one second 💖

okay bestie, welcome to bup-tick(1) from the General Commands Manual ✨ it's a tiny little cutie and honestly? iconic.

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✨ NAME ✨

bup-tick — wait for up to one second 🕐

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

bup tick

that's it. that's the whole thing. no flags, no drama, just vibes. 🫶

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the tea: bup tick just sits there and waits until time(2) hands back a different value than the one it started with. and because time() has a granularity of one second, this means you might be waiting up to one whole second. like, yes, a whole second, in this economy 😭

now why would you ever want that? main character behavior, that's why: this program is useful for writing tests that need to make sure a file date will actually be seen as modified. periodt. 💅

and here's the flex — it's slightly better than sleep(1) because sometimes it waits for less than one second. not always. but sometimes. and that sometimes is what we call ✨efficiency✨ ngl.

lowkey the whole point: time() only changes once per second, so you're basically waiting for the clock to go 16:59:58 ➡️ 16:59:59 and then you're free 🕊️

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🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

run it like this, bestie:

$ date; bup tick; date
Sat Feb  6 16:59:58 EST 2010
Sat Feb  6 16:59:59 EST 2010

see how it went from 58 to 59? that's the tick. the clock ticked. we love to see it 😌👑

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🎀 BUP 🎀

It's part of the bup(1) suite. family reunion fr fr 🫂

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💜 AUTHORS 💜

Avery Pennarun — apenwarr@gmail.com 🌟

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and that's a wrap, bestie! this page came from Bup 0.34, dated 2026-09-01, and it lives in the manual as bup-tick(1). go tick that clock, you've got this 💖🌸✨