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

by

[I was going to post this as a comment on John Cromartie’s post, but didn’t realize you couldn’t use formatting in a comment.]

I agree. Dropping it to a shell with os.execute() will definitely work but in general making shell calls is expensive. Wrapping some C code will be much quicker at run-time. In C/C++ on a Linux system, you could use:

static int lua_sleep(lua_State *L)
{
    int m = static_cast<int> (luaL_checknumber(L,1));
    usleep(m * 1000); 
    // usleep takes microseconds. This converts the parameter to milliseconds. 
    // Change this as necessary. 
    // Alternatively, use 'sleep()' to treat the parameter as whole seconds. 
    return 0;
}

Then, in main, do: 

lua_pushcfunction(L, lua_sleep);
lua_setglobal(L, "sleep");

where “L” is your lua_State. Then, in your Lua script called from C/C++, you can use your function by calling:

sleep(1000) -- Sleeps for one second

More Related Contents:

  1. How can I create a secure Lua sandbox?
  2. How do you copy a Lua table by value?
  3. Why does Lua’s length (#) operator return unexpected values?
  4. How to get number of entries in a Lua table?
  5. Safely remove items from an array table while iterating
  6. Print all local variables accessible to the current scope in Lua
  7. How to get list of directories in Lua
  8. ESP8266 NodeMCU Running Out of Heap Memory
  9. How do I run an executable using Lua?
  10. How to dump a table to console?
  11. How do I de-obfuscate a Lua script?
  12. Lua find a key from a value
  13. Get back the output of os.execute in Lua
  14. “main” function in Lua?
  15. What does LUA acronym stand for?
  16. Returning the index of a value in a Lua table
  17. Difference between . and : in Lua
  18. Sort points in clockwise order?
  19. NSURLErrorDomain error code -999 in iOS
  20. Split string in Lua?
  21. Generating uniform random numbers in Lua
  22. Call a function by an external application without opening a new instance of Matlab
  23. What is the standard (or best supported) big number (arbitrary precision) library for Lua?
  24. Lua math.random not working
  25. Casting between void * and a pointer to member function
  26. How to fix “NSURLErrorDomain error code -999” in iOS
  27. How can I embed Lua in Java?
  28. What is the difference between pairs() and ipairs() in Lua?
  29. Iterating through a Lua table from C++?
  30. Best tool(s) for decompiling Lua bytecode? [closed]

Leave a Comment