how to produce delay in ruby

Question

How to produce delay in ruby?

I used sleep statement but it didn't give me what I want.

puts "amit"
sleep(10)
puts "scj"

I want it to first print amit, then a delay of 10 seconds, then print scj.

But in above case what happens is it will pause for 10 seconds and then it will print amit and scj together. I don't want that.

I hope you got what I want to say.

Answer 1

Call $stdout.flush before the call to sleep. The output is probably buffered (although usually output is only line-buffered so puts, which produces a newline, should work without flushing, but apparently that's not true for your terminal).

Answer 2

I can't reproduce this. From a console, this does exactly what you'd expect:

puts "amit"
sleep 10
puts "scj"

(Ruby 1.8.6 on Linux)

Can you provide a similar short but complete example which doesn't do what you want - or explain your context more?

If you're writing a web application, then the browser may well only see any data once the whole response has been written - that would explain what you're seeing. If that's the case, you'll need a different approach which would allow the initial response to be written first, and then make the browser make another request. The delay could be at the server or the client, depending no the scenario.