Tell Ruby Program to Wait some amount of time

Question

How do you tell a Ruby program to wait an arbitrary amount of time before moving on to the next line of code?

thanks

Answer 1

sleep

Answer 2

Use sleep like so:

sleep 2

That'll sleep for 2 seconds.

Be careful to give an argument. If you just run sleep, the process will sleep forever. (This is useful when you want a thread to sleep until it's woken.)

Answer 3

It's pretty easy:

sleep(num_secs)

The 'num_secs' value can be an integer or float. Also, if you're writing this within a Rails app, or have included the ActiveSupport library elsewhere in your project, you can construct longer intervals using the following convenience syntax:

sleep(4.minutes)
# or, even longer...
sleep(2.hours); sleep(3.days) # etc., etc.