Sleeping in Go – How to Pause Execution

May 3, 2017 · 102 words · 1 minute read

#seconds #sleep #sleeping #time #unix #wait #goroutine #pause

Sleeping, or waiting in Go, is part of the time package. It’s a very simple process, all you need to do is specify the duration to sleep for, which in this case is a number followed by it’s unit, so 2*time.Second means 2 seconds. This will sleep the current goroutine so other go routines will continue to run.

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package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    fmt.Printf("Current Unix Time: %v\n", time.Now().Unix())

    time.Sleep(2 * time.Second)

    fmt.Printf("Current Unix Time: %v\n", time.Now().Unix())
}

And here’s what it looks like:

Example of pausing execution

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Author: Edd Turtle

Edd is the Lead Developer at Hoowla, a prop-tech startup, where he spends much of his time working on production-ready Go and PHP code. He loves coding, but also enjoys cycling and camping in his spare time.

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