## THREADWAIT Wait on a thread to complete execution

Section: FreeMat Threads

### Usage

The `threadwait` function waits for the given thread to complete execution, and stops execution of the current thread (the one calling `threadwait`) until the given thread completes. The syntax for its use is

       success = threadwait(handle)

where `handle` is the value returned by `threadnew` and `success` is a `logical` vaariable that will be `1` if the wait was successful or `0` if the wait times out. By default, the wait is indefinite. It is better to use the following form of the function

       success = threadwait(handle,timeout)

where `timeout` is the amount of time (in milliseconds) for the `threadwait` function to wait before a timeout occurs. If the `threadwait` function succeeds, then the return value is a logical `1`, and if it fails, the return value is a logical `0`. Note that you can call `threadwait` multiple times on a thread, and if the thread is completed, each one will succeed.

### Example

Here we lauch the `sleep` function in a thread with a time delay of 10 seconds. This means that the thread function will not complete until 10 seconds have elapsed. When we call `threadwait` on this thread with a short timeout, it fails, but not when the timeout is long enough to capture the end of the function call.

    --> a = threadnew;
    --> threadstart(a,'sleep',0,10);  % start a thread that will sleep for 10
    --> threadwait(a,2000)            % 2 second wait is not long enough

    ans =

     0

    --> threadwait(a,10000)           % 10 second wait is long enough

    ans =

     1

    --> threadfree(a)
    -->
    quit