If you look closely at my thread's code block, you will see it is wrapped in a while loop.....I call it a sleeping thread, and you control it thru shared variables. When you create the thread, it keeps looping(and sleeping a bit) until it gets a go variable change. Here is a simple example of a sleeping thread. As you can see from my other complex example, you need to keep track of everything in hashes if you have more than one threads. It also helps to have an event-loop system, so you don't need difficult while() loops in main to watch the threads, but a clever while loop will work. SeeRoll your own Event-loop and Readkey with timer using Glib

Don't forget, you can modify that thread's while loop to suit your purposes, you just need to be creative to suit your exact situation. Also remember, you can share filhandles across threads thru the fileno. So you might want to communicate by print to a filehandle in the thread, and reading it in main.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use threads;
use threads::shared;

my $data:shared = '';
my $go_control:shared = 0;
my $die_control:shared = 0;

my $thr = threads->new(\&excecute);


print "press a key to start thread\n";
<>;
$go_control = 1;


for( 1.. 10){
   print "\t\t$data\n";
   select(undef,undef,undef,.25);
}


print "press a key to stop thread\n";
<>;
$go_control = 0;

print "press a key to kill thread\n";
<>;
$die_control = 1;
print "press a key to exit\n";
<>;


sub excecute{
      
   my $count;
  
   while(1){
      
      if($die_control){
             print "thread finishing\n"; 
             return} 
      
      #wait for $go_control  
      if($go_control){      
          
                 if($die_control){
                    print "thread finishing\n"; 
                           return} 
               
               $data = $count++;            
               print $data,"\n";
           select(undef,undef,undef,.25);
         
      
        }else{ select(undef,undef,undef,.25); }# sleep until awakened 
   }
    
return;
}
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