Mastering Perl/Tk

Time Delays

There are times when you’ll want to be able to delay the program a bit before going on, or maybe you’ll want to execute the same command every minute. For complete details, see Chapter 15 and Chapter 17. To have the program sleep for x number of milliseconds, call after with the number of milliseconds:

$widget->after(milliseconds);

You almost never want to do this, as the event loop is blocked.

To specify a callback that will be called after so many milliseconds instead of waiting, send a callback as the second argument to after:

$id = $widget->after(milliseconds, callback);
# i.e.
$id = $widget->after(1000, \&do_something);

If you want to execute a subroutine after the program has been idle for a while, call afterIdle:

$id = $widget->afterIdle(callback);

To cancel the call to after or afterIdle, use afterCancel with the $id returned by after:

$widget->afterCancel($id);
# You can also do this:
$id->cancel;

You can have the program repeatedly call the same callback by using the repeat method:

$widget->repeat(milliseconds, callback);
# i.e.
$widget->repeat(600, \&update_status);

If you destroy $widget, any calls to after and repeat are automatically canceled for you.