Easiest way to make lua script wait/pause/sleep/block for a few seconds?

Question

I cant figure out how to get lua to do any common timing tricks, such as

• sleep - stop all action on thread

• pause/wait - don\'t go on to the

Answer 1

It doesn't get easier than this. Sleep might be implemented in your FLTK or whatever, but this covers all the best ways to do standard sort of system sleeps without special event interrupts. Behold:

-- we "pcall" (try/catch) the "ex", which had better include os.sleep
-- it may be a part of the standard library in future Lua versions (past 5.2)
local ok,ex = pcall(require,"ex")
if ok then
   -- print("Ex")
   -- we need a hack now too? ex.install(), you say? okay
   pcall(ex.install)
   -- let's try something else. why not?
   if ex.sleep and not os.sleep then os.sleep = ex.sleep end
end

if not os.sleep then
   -- we make os.sleep
   -- first by trying ffi, which is part of LuaJIT, which lets us write C code
   local ok,ffi = pcall(require,"ffi")
   if ok then
      -- print("FFI")
      -- we can use FFI
      -- let's just check one more time to make sure we still don't have os.sleep
      if not os.sleep then
         -- okay, here is our custom C sleep code:
         ffi.cdef[[
            void Sleep(int ms);
            int poll(struct pollfd *fds,unsigned long nfds,int timeout);
         ]]
         if ffi.os == "Windows" then
            os.sleep = function(sec)
               ffi.C.Sleep(sec*1000)
            end
         else
            os.sleep = function(sec)
               ffi.C.poll(nil,0,sec*1000)
            end
         end
      end
   else
      -- if we can't use FFI, we try LuaSocket, which is just called "socket"
      -- I'm 99.99999999% sure of that
      local ok,socket = pcall(require,"socket")
      -- ...but I'm not 100% sure of that
      if not ok then local ok,socket = pcall(require,"luasocket") end
      -- so if we're really using socket...
      if ok then
         -- print("Socket")
         -- we might as well confirm there still is no os.sleep
         if not os.sleep then
            -- our custom socket.select to os.sleep code:
            os.sleep = function(sec)
               socket.select(nil,nil,sec)
            end
         end
      else
         -- now we're going to test "alien"
         local ok,alien = pcall(require,"alien")
         if ok then
         -- print("Alien")
         -- beam me up...
            if not os.sleep then
               -- if we still don't have os.sleep, that is
               -- now, I don't know what the hell the following code does
               if alien.platform == "windows" then
                  kernel32 = alien.load("kernel32.dll")
                  local slep = kernel32.Sleep
                  slep:types{ret="void",abi="stdcall","uint"}
                  os.sleep = function(sec)
                     slep(sec*1000)
                  end
               else
                  local pol = alien.default.poll
                  pol:types('struct', 'unsigned long', 'int')
                  os.sleep = function(sec)
                     pol(nil,0,sec*1000)
                  end
               end
            end
         elseif package.config:match("^\\") then
            -- print("busywait")
            -- if the computer is politically opposed to NIXon, we do the busywait
            -- and shake it all about
            os.sleep = function(sec)
               local timr = os.time()
               repeat until os.time() > timr + sec
            end
         else
            -- print("NIX")
            -- or we get NIXed
            os.sleep = function(sec)
               os.execute("sleep " .. sec)
            end
         end
      end
   end
end