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From: Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com>
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art
Subject: Re: pause
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:14:20 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Some absurd concept
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In alt.ascii-art, jer0en <jer0en@freemail.nl> wrote:
> trouble with ascii and the initial set of control codes is there isn't a
> pause character, not even in ansi.

You are doing animations? The old trick is just pad with some sort of
no-op to get the delay needed. Spaces and carriage return (without
linefeed), lots of nulls, things like that. Those worked fine on the
slow (2400 or less) connection speeds of old, but you need a lot of
padding for a modern window. My xterm ssh'ed to a remote host claims
to be 38400 baud, but I bet it's faster than that. 

My crude -- it works for some animations, but not all --  solution:
a perl script I call slowcat, that pauses during printing. Source
included below.

Elijah
------
#!/usr/bin/perl -wn
# slowcat: A slow version of 'cat' for playing ascii-art movies on
# fast terminals.
#
# B. Elijah Griffin / Eli the Bearded	7 Jun 2001

use strict;
use vars qw( $part @parts $delay $default);

BEGIN {
  my $usage;

  $default = 0.02;

USAGE:
  if ($usage) {
    print STDERR <<"UsageEnd";
$0: usage
    slowcat [ -d delay ] [file ...]

Delay is fractional seconds.  Default delay is $default seconds.
UsageEnd
    exit 2;
  }

  if (defined($ARGV[0])) {
    if ($ARGV[0] eq '-h' or $ARGV[0] eq '--help') {
      $usage = 1;
      goto USAGE;
    } elsif ($ARGV[0] eq '-d' or $ARGV[0] eq '--delay') {
      shift;
      $delay = shift;
      if (!defined($delay) or $delay !~ /^(?:\d*\.)?\d+$/) {
        warn "$0: Bad delay\n";
        $usage = 1;
        goto USAGE;
      }
    }
  }

  $delay = $default unless $delay;
  $| ++;
# system("tput clear");
}

@parts = split(/(?=\c[)/);
for $part (@parts) {
  if (length($part) > 80) {
    while(length($part)) {
      select(undef,undef,undef, $delay);
      print substr($part,0,80,'');
    }
  } else {
    select(undef,undef,undef, $delay);
    print $part;
  }
}

__END__