Dealing with time sleep and overruns

Time, in a system programming context, doesn't only involve the act of measuring the duration of an event or reading the clock. It's also possible to put a process to sleep for a certain amount of time. This recipe will teach you how to put a process to sleep by using the seconds-based API, the microseconds-based API, and the clock_nanosleep() method, which has nanosecond resolution. Furthermore, we'll see what time overruns are and how we can minimize them.

How to do it...

In this section, we'll write a program to learn how to put a program to sleep by using the different POSIX APIs that are available. We'll also look at the C++ alternative:

1. Open a shell...