Question about alarm()

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

I've recently started learning perl, and have been writing simple little useless scripts to practice and have come to a dead end in the one im currently working on. Its a music player, it searches, loads, makes playlists and such and is working like i intended except for the fact that i have to change all songs manually do to the fact that i cant count down the seconds till the song is finished to change AND get input from <STDIN> for directing the script. I was wondering if there was a way to use the alarm function and $SIG{ALRM} to call a subroutine after the alarm goes off? So that i could set the alarm for the song length, then use the subroutine to change songs after its completed AND wait for user input to change volume or playlists and such. I would post the code even though its irrelevant but im not quite sure how to quote it in those fancy code blocks :D thanks so much Ryan

Comment on Question about alarm()

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Re: Question about alarm() by lostjimmy (Chaplain) on Mar 05, 2009 at 21:59 UTC
I think another approach you might consider taking would be spawning off the music player in a separate thread and taking the input on the main thread, or vice versa. Take a look at Markup in the Monastery to find out how to use those handy code tags and others ;)	[reply]
Re^2: Question about alarm() by skywalker (Beadle) on Mar 06, 2009 at 15:22 UTC
I had a similar problem with a TK GUI app I wrote. I found using alarm to be the best solution as threads are great however sending and receiving data can get quite complex pretty quick. try `my $timer_start = $mw->after(1000 => \&yoursub); $mw->afterCancel($timer_start);` [download] thanks skywalker	[reply] [d/l]