Interfacing with the operating system
Lua runs on many operating systems, and as an embedded language can run just about anywhere. The os package provides functionality to interface with the underlying operating system in a uniform way.
Working with time
The first function to know when working with time is os.clock. This function returns the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Lua program started running. Code tends to run pretty fast, but the following code should print out two different time stamps:
print ("Time: " .. os.clock())
for i=1,1000,1 do
-- Just spin
end
print ("Time: " .. os.clock())Seconds is a very granular measure of time. os.date can be used to retrieve less-granular bits of time. This function takes a format string as an argument, and returns the formatted time as a string.
Note
The arguments for os.date are the same as the arguments for the strftime function in C. A full list of arguments is online here: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/strftime/
For example...
