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

I would implement a simple function to wrap the host system's sleep function in C.

Answer 2

You can't do it in pure Lua without eating CPU, but there's a simple, non-portable way:

os.execute("sleep 1")

(it will block)

Obviously, this only works on operating systems for which "sleep 1" is a valid command, for instance Unix, but not Windows.

Answer 3

for windows you can do this:

os.execute("CHOICE /n /d:y /c:yn /t:5")

Answer 4

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()

Answer 5

For the second request, pause/wait, where you stop processing in Lua and continue to run your application, you need coroutines. You end up with some C code like this following:

Lthread=lua_newthread(L);
luaL_loadfile(Lthread, file);
while ((status=lua_resume(Lthread, 0) == LUA_YIELD) {
  /* do some C code here */
}

and in Lua, you have the following:

function try_pause (func, param)
  local rc=func(param)
  while rc == false do
    coroutine.yield()
    rc=func(param)
  end
end

function is_data_ready (data)
  local rc=true
  -- check if data is ready, update rc to false if not ready
  return rc
end

try_pause(is_data_ready, data)

Answer 6

This should work:

    os.execute("PAUSE")