Thread: How can I "sleep" without hogging CPU

I wonder if someone would be kind enough to help me with a "timer" problem.
Briefly, I want to start a program passing it a delay in seconds as an argument, and a batch file (or similar) to carry out at the elapsed time. (eg. prog 10 do_it.bat)
I've got the following funtion in main:

void snooze( clock_t wait ) {
clock_t targ;
targ = wait + clock();
while( targ > clock() ) {
/* wait ! */
}
}

which is called thus:
snooze((clock_t)nSecs * CLOCKS_PER_SEC); (where nSecs is argv[1])

and everything's lovely....BUT then I tried to do something else on the computer whilst running it and my CPU's 98.9% used !!

Can anyone suggest a better way of doing this please - there's no real urgency, it's just something I wanted to do 'cos I figured it would be interesting !

The sleep() dosen't work. I have looked in the FAQ and have this working:

Code:

void sleep_seconds ( long seconds ) {
  clock_t limit, now = clock();
  limit = now + seconds * CLOCKS_PER_SEC;
  while ( limit > now )
    now = clock();
}

but this hogs the CPU. What commands work with the Pelles C for Windows, that create a delay without using up all the CPU?

I believe the sleep() function in windows.h uses the spare time to give to other processes.

I get a "Missing Prototype for 'Sleep'" error

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <windows.h>

int main (void){
	
printf("1");

sleep(2000);

printf("2");
sleep(3000); 
printf("3");

return 0;
}

My fault, I apologize. Same problem earlier this week!

Thanks guys. It's working now

Originally Posted by Emmanuel Delaha

sleep() (whatever the details) is not standard.

It depends what you mean by "standard". It isn't ANSI, but it conforms to POSIX standard...