This command is used to delay execution of the program or to execute a command in background sometime in
the future. It has several forms, depending on the first argument to the command:
aftermsMs must be an integer giving a time in milliseconds. A negative number is treated as 0. The
command sleeps for ms milliseconds and then returns. While the command is sleeping the
application does not respond to events.
afterms ?scriptscriptscript...?
In this form the command returns immediately, but it arranges for a Tcl command to be executed ms
milliseconds later as an event handler. The command will be executed exactly once, at the given
time. The delayed command is formed by concatenating all the script arguments in the same fashion
as the concat command. The command will be executed at global level (outside the context of any
Tcl procedure). If an error occurs while executing the delayed command then the background error
will be reported by the command registered with interpbgerror. The after command returns an
identifier that can be used to cancel the delayed command using aftercancel. A ms value of 0 (or
negative) queues the event immediately with priority over other event types (if not installed with
an event proc, which will wait for next round of events).
aftercancelid
Cancels the execution of a delayed command that was previously scheduled. Id indicates which
command should be canceled; it must have been the return value from a previous after command. If
the command given by id has already been executed then the aftercancel command has no effect.
aftercancelscriptscript...
This command also cancels the execution of a delayed command. The script arguments are
concatenated together with space separators (just as in the concat command). If there is a
pending command that matches the string, it is canceled and will never be executed; if no such
command is currently pending then the aftercancel command has no effect.
afteridlescript ?scriptscript...?
Concatenates the script arguments together with space separators (just as in the concat command),
and arranges for the resulting script to be evaluated later as an idle callback. The script will
be run exactly once, the next time the event loop is entered and there are no events to process.
The command returns an identifier that can be used to cancel the delayed command using aftercancel. If an error occurs while executing the script then the background error will be reported
by the command registered with interpbgerror.
afterinfo ?id?
This command returns information about existing event handlers. If no id argument is supplied,
the command returns a list of the identifiers for all existing event handlers created by the after
command for this interpreter. If id is supplied, it specifies an existing handler; id must have
been the return value from some previous call to after and it must not have triggered yet or been
canceled. In this case the command returns a list with two elements. The first element of the
list is the script associated with id, and the second element is either idle or timer to indicate
what kind of event handler it is.
The afterms and afteridle forms of the command assume that the application is event driven: the
delayed commands will not be executed unless the application enters the event loop. In applications that
are not normally event-driven, such as tclsh, the event loop can be entered with the vwait and update
commands.