[ruby] Tell Ruby Program to Wait some amount of time

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

This question is related to ruby sleep

The answer is


Like this

sleep(no_of_seconds)

Or you may pass other possible arguments like:

sleep(5.seconds)

sleep(5.minutes)

sleep(5.hours)

sleep(5.days)


This is an example of using sleep with sidekiq

require 'sidekiq'

class PlainOldRuby
  include Sidekiq::Worker

  def perform(how_hard="super hard", how_long=10)
    sleep how_long
    puts "Workin' #{how_hard}"
  end
end

sleep for 10 seconds and print out "Working super hard" .


I find until very useful with sleep. example:

> time = Time.now
> sleep 2.seconds until Time.now > time + 10.seconds # breaks when true
# or something like
> sleep 1.seconds until !req.loading # suggested by ohsully

sleep 6 will sleep for 6 seconds. For a longer duration, you can also use sleep(6.minutes) or sleep(6.hours).


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.)


Implementation of seconds/minutes/hours, which are rails methods. Note that implicit returns aren't needed, but they look cleaner, so I prefer them. I'm not sure Rails even has .days or if it goes further, but these are the ones I need.

class Integer
   def seconds
      return self
   end
   def minutes
      return self * 60
   end
   def hours
      return self * 3600
   end
   def days
      return self * 86400
   end
end

After this, you can do: sleep 5.seconds to sleep for 5 seconds. You can do sleep 5.minutes to sleep for 5 min. You can do sleep 5.hours to sleep for 5 hours. And finally, you can do sleep 5.days to sleep for 5 days... You can add any method that return the value of self * (amount of seconds in that timeframe). As an exercise, try implementing it for months!