Wait() Command in C?
 

(if this isn't an apropriate place to post this I appologise)

Ok here's the thing.
I'm one of those extreamly dorky kids who didn't have any computer related class in public school but learnt a few programming languages anyway.
So now that I'm finally in university (csci) first year has been a breeze.

Anyway, enough stupid background info.

I'm making a program that creates a silly little ascii graphic, but it's supposed to be animated and change (using clrscr() in the non-standard conio.h)

Here's my problem though. I want there to be a short delay in between each update of the picture. (so it doesn't flicker as an unconprehensibale speed)

What I'm looking for is a function something like
where time is the amout of time you want the program to wait untill it executes the next statement.

So far I'm just lagging the program with a horrible, horrible recursive function. It works rather well but it's an awful hack.

Any suggestions would please me to no end.

ps. please forgive the large amount of personal pronouns! :p

try sleep
 

This looks like what your looking for (if you are on unix or linux):


Im not much of a C programmer but i dont think windows would have unistd.h.

If your on windows check out MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...base/sleep.asp

windows has Sleep which is in millliseconds time.h iirc

also if you can't find a sleep you can nearly always find a clock
so all youd have to do is

start = clock();
{
diff = clock()-start;
}while(diff<1000);

while its pretty horrible in a multitasking os , if its all you have it'll work fine

clrscr and conio.h sounds like dos maybe ?

Thanks for the the great info people!

I couldn't use the first tip since i'm coding in windows (for now)

But the second worked perfectly!
It was simple to make into a little function.
Wee!
/me is pleased

Umm, Sleep() is an MS Windows function. You can't use it?

I'd recommend Sleep() over a self-made busy wating routine, unless you're unconcerned about bogging down your processor...

i'm attempting to avoid OS specific code though.

yeah as i said the testing loop is pretty bad in a multitasking os, but if you only use it in short bursts it'll be ok ( given that you can't use a thread dormant method)

in windows, the clock method would put you around 80% cpu usage, the Sleep method would put you in the < 15% which is normal system idle.

There is a sleep function in the C standard library.
[EDIT] Oops... I'm wrong[/EDIT]

if you mean the ansi C stdlib then there isn't, theres no sleep, or delay.

N794 so its a little older but its not in newer versions either.
http://www.vmunix.com/~gabor/c/draft.html

you might be mistaking an add on sleep function added by an os or a compiler suite.

MS's version of sleep does pretty much the same as what i posted, last time i checked it.
[edit]
I rechecked MS's version of sleep which is _sleep, its basically a wrapper that calls Sleep, first checking to see if its a zero argument and then incrementing it.

often with MS's VC functions since they are quite often just ever so slightly different they add an _ but just as often theres a #define to set sleep to _sleep