G'day lycanhunter,

Welcome to the Monastery.

Without seeing any code or even knowing how your application is to be run, here's some module suggestions.

Smart::Comments

Possibly the easiest to use. See both the Progress Bars and Time-Remaining Estimates sections. It uses source filters which could be a potential problem: see BUGS AND LIMITATIONS.

Term::Spinner

This displays a text-based spinner. It shows that the program is still running but doesn't give any indication of progress. This module requires Moose.

Tk::ProgressBar

If your application is a Tk GUI, this provides a graphical progress bar. Other GUIs will typically provide their own graphical progress bars.

If you provide better initial information, we can provide better help. I appreciate this is your first post and possibly you weren't aware what sort of details we needed. Before posting again, please read "How do I post a question effectively?": better questions get better answers.

Maybe simply counting the elements added to the array and printing out some message each time that number is a multiple of some predetermined value (say, for example, 10,000). We are doing that all the time in a slightly different context: extracting data from a database for hours and hours (sometimes even days), and printing into the log file the date and the number of records extracted every 10,000 (or whatever) records. This way we can know at any point that the task is progressing, that it is not just hanging doing nothing.

This can be done by offloading the work that takes a long time to a separate script, and calling that one from a primary script.

The first file (call.pl) calls via a background system() call to the script that does the actual work that takes a long time (busy.pl). While busy.pl is doing stuff, the call.pl loops over to check for a lock file, and will inform the user that work is going on in the background.

call.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

# call.pl

use warnings;
use strict;

my $lock_file = 'lock.lck';

print "$0: Calling subtask script...\n";

system("/usr/bin/perl busy.pl &");

my $start = 0;

while(1){

    # on first loop, sleep two seconds before checking
    # for the lock file

    sleep(2) if ! $start;
    $start++;

    if (-e $lock_file){
        print "$0: Subtask still running...\n";
        sleep(1);
        next;
    }
    print "$0: Done!\n";
    exit;
}
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busy.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

# busy.pl

use warnings;
use strict;

my $lock_file = 'lock.lck';

open my $lock, '>', $lock_file
  or die "Can't grab a lock file: $!";

print "$0: Starting subtask...\n";

sleep(5);

print "$0: Ending subtask...\n";

close $lock;
unlink $lock_file;
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Output:

$ perl call.pl

call.pl: Calling subtask script...
busy.pl: Starting subtask...
call.pl: Subtask still running...
call.pl: Subtask still running...
call.pl: Subtask still running...
call.pl: Subtask still running...
busy.pl: Ending subtask...
call.pl: Done!
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-stevieb

What type of operation requires 25 minutes? And if that can't be improved then the load should be automated and the data cached locally so that the user can treat it as the original without delay.

As usual: Show some relevant code. Everything else forces us to guess.

To find hot spots in your code, use Devel::NYTProf:

perl -dNYTProf yourscript.pl
nytprofhtml --open
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Alexander

Hi,

Can you at lest give us sample of your code so we can help you

In some cases you may be able to interrupt whatever is happening with an alarm to print a ticker, set another alarm, and the resume the activity. This is highly dependent on what is actually running. With safe signals, some actions are not nicely interruptible.

Show some toy code, and someone will be along to tweak it for you.

the script now works with a heartbeat. Thank You again

my @voblist = `cat /home/vobadmin/scripts/voblist.txt`;
foreach my $i (@voblist) {
    chomp($i);
    my $vob = "\/vobs\/$i";
    chomp($vob);
        print '[' . timestamp() . ']  Start Time'. "\n";
        print OUTFILE '[' . timestamp() . ']  Start Time'. "\n";
    print "VOB is:  $vob\n";
    chdir $vob;
    open($FH, "cleartool find . -all -print|")
    or die "Something went wrong\n";
    print STDERR "Loading Array with elements from $vob\n ";
    while (<$FH>) {
        push @element, $_;
        unless ($. % 10) { # every 10 lines
        print STDERR ".";
        }
    }
    print "\n";
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Now fill the array while it is keeping heartbeat.

A simple script would be like

 @march = `cleartool find /vobs/41Rational_Val/. -all -print`;
while (<@march>) {    ### processing...                  done
}
print "\n";
close(@march);
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This using the Smart Comments module. But it waits until the load of the array finishes before displaying the progress.

I don't have time at the moment to do full justice to this, but an (untested!) snippet might look like this:

open(my $FH, "cleartool find /vobs/41Rational_Val/. -all -print|")
    or die "Something went wrong\n";

print STDERR "Reading cleartool command, line ";
while (<$FH>) {
    do_something_here;
    unless ($. % 200) { # every 200 lines
        print STDERR "$. ";
  }
}
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However, there is no way to know the percent complete progress of the cleartool command.

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of