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's also easy to use Alien as a libc/msvcrt wrapper:

> luarocks install alien

Then from lua:

require 'alien'

if alien.platform == "windows" then
    -- untested!!
    libc = alien.load("msvcrt.dll")
else
    libc = alien.default
end 

usleep = libc.usleep
usleep:types('int', 'uint')

function sleep(ms)
    while ms > 1000 do
        usleep(1000)
        ms = ms - 1000
    end
    usleep(1000 * ms)
end

print('hello')
sleep(500)  -- sleep 500 ms
print('world')

Caveat lector: I haven't tried this on MSWindows; I don't even know if msvcrt has a usleep()