SJOB

Syntax

SJOB jobnr,timeout or

SJOB jobname,timeout

Location

TinyToolkit

There are three ways in which a job can be made to do nothing:

  1. Remove the job;

  2. Set the job’s priority to 0;

  3. Suspend the job.

This command suspends the specified job for a specified period of time, which can be identified either by its jobnr (see JOBS) or by -1 (meaning the current job) or by its name (which need not be in quotes). Although suspending a job does not alter its priority, a suspended job will have no effect upon the speed of the QL. A positive timeout will stop the Job for timeout/50 seconds, whereas any negative number will suspend the job forever (ie. it can only be re-activated by an express command such as REL_JOB). The highest positive timeout is 32768 frames which is approximately 9 minutes, 6 seconds.

Example 1

SJOB "Quill", -1

will suspend Quill indefinitely.

SJOB Quill,-1

is the same even if there is a variable called Quill.

SJOB -1, 100

will suspend the current job for approx. 2 seconds.

SJOB 10, 100

will suspend Job number 10 for approx. 2 seconds

Example 2

A background Job which carries out work which is not time consuming, should not slow the whole system down, otherwise it is a complete waste of the computer’s available time. Unfortunately, a priority of 1 is too high for a simple action such as checking the clock or updating key macros (See ALTKEY).

SJOB is useful to slow this job down to the desired speed. SJOB is also useful for setting PAUSEs independently of the machine’s speed. The following program demonstrates both uses of SJOB and has to be compiled and executed as a multitasking job (ie. EXEC).

The priority of the job does not really matter, because the job only wakes up once a minute, looks at the clock and then drops off again.

100 REPeat Tower
110   d$=DATE$: minute=d$(16 TO 17)
120   SELect ON minute
130     =30:BEEP 20000,0,100,1000,0
140     =0:hour=d$(13 TO 14) MOD 12:IF hour=0:hour=12
150         FOR h=1 to hour: BEEP 10000,h,10,100,1: SJOB Q_MYJOB,65
160     =15:BEEP 5000,0,10,20,5000
170   END SELect
180   SJOB Q_MYJOB,3000
190 END REPeat Tower

This example needs Qliberator’s Q_MYJOB function.

NOTE

As from v1.11, jobnr can be -1, so in the above example 2, you could use SJOB -1,65 and SJOB -1,3000 instead of the similar commands in lines 150 and 180 respectively. Earlier versions would also not accept a variable as the parameter for the job number.

CROSS-REFERENCE

REL_JOB releases a suspended job. JOBS lists all current jobs. SUSJOB and TTSUS are almost the same as SJOB.