Simple Text Animation

dooberwah has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm trying to make some simple text animations in a program and was wondering how the best way to pause for a small amount of time before switching "frames" is. I'm doing really simple stuff, all ASCII art and just need to switch between a few pictures with small delay periods. I looked at the sleep() function and it didn't really seem to work all that well, it paused too long and The Camel Book says that it can vary by up to a second on different systems. Any help for me, the clueless newbie, would be appriciated.

-Ben Jacobs

Comment on Simple Text Animation

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Re: Simple Text Animation by chipmunk (Parson) on Apr 23, 2001 at 03:07 UTC
How can I sleep() or alarm() for under a second? I've found that select(undef, undef, undef, .1) generally makes for a good pause for ASCII animation.	[reply]
Re: Simple Text Animation by the_slycer (Chaplain) on Apr 23, 2001 at 03:08 UTC
Read sleep and notice the last paragraph: For delays of finer granularity than one second, you may use Perl's `syscall()` interface to access `setitimer(2)` if your system supports it, or else see `select()` above. See also the POSIX module's `sigpause()`function.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Simple Text Animation by Beatnik (Parson) on Apr 23, 2001 at 12:36 UTC
Check I think I saw it move!... Greetz Beatnik ... Quidquid perl dictum sit, altum viditur.	[reply]