Wait until widget is shown

[Micah Carrick <email micahcarrick com>]

I have a function that will take some time to run.. actually, it forks 
out another process which can take up to say 4 seconds.  I want to 
display a modal dialog during this time, or perhaps just a statusbar 
message.  In any case, whatever I do does not show up until AFTER the 
process is finished (and thus only shows up for an isntance).

I thought I could maybe create a global flag that is set right before 
gtk_widget_show() , and is cleared once the "show" signal occurs for 
that widget, and then have an infinate loop waiting for that flag to be 
clear before calling that process.  This bothers me because of the 
infinate loop and because it just seems like there's likely a better 
way. Like is therea function call that allows pending redraws or 
whatever to complete before continuing?  Like a "do pending tasks" sort 
of thing.  I saw a gtk_wait in another program once but I don't see that 
in the documentation.

Any help?

- Micah