How do I set up a timer as a subprocess?

[Daniel Schüle]

Hi

> Trying to set up a timer function for my irc bot, which uses the python
> irclib.py.
>
> If I use time.sleep(20), it tends to freeze up the bot completely for 20
> secs. That's not what I want though! I want the program to wait 20 secs,
> then perform another function, but in the meantime be able to accept other
> commands.
>
> How do I do that?

if I understand properly what you want to achieve, you will need to
setup a separate execution thread

import thread

def f1():
        return "hallo"

def f2():
        return " World"

func_list = [f1, f2, lamda : "!!!"]

def otherThread(sec):
        import time
        for i in func_list:
                print i(),
                time.sleep(sec)

thread.start_new_thread(otherThread, (20, ))

print "meanwhile print this message"
i = raw_input("or let the user give some instructions")
def xx():
    pass
xx()

i hope this is what you are looking for
my code is however untested, but should work