So for whatever reason, there is no standard sleep command in unix that will sleep for less than a second. I guess some distributions have usleep (microsleep) which is great if your system has it or if what your writing is just for your system. But anyways...say you want to delete a bunch of files without locking up your machine...

ls -al ~/oldFiles | perl -lne "unlink; select(undef,undef,undef,.05);"

Where .05 would be 50ms.

Special thanks to perl and google.