But here is how to make one from scratch. Open terminal screen and type:

sleep 5 ; say "Time is up"

Well that’s it This command will sleep for 5 seconds and say “Time is up” at the end of 5 seconds.

We can make a little script out of it and save as /usr/local/bin/timer as below:

#!/bin/bash
sleep $1 ; say "Time is up"

You can invoke the command like this, it will sleep 5 seconds and tell you “Time is up”:

timer 5

As a bonus, if you want minutes instead of seconds, you can always do something like this which will run the timer for 5 minutes:

timer `echo "5*60" | bc`