timer in php-cli

Hello, I'm writing a php irc bot. I've come up to the situation where I need a timer for processing different data in a "special" way. I've searched the archive of the list but I didn't found nothing helpful (I can't use JavaScript here, neither cron). If I use for(;;) or sleep(); the whole script stops (php is not multithread:(). Eventually I've come up with some ideas about ticks, but didn't get to finished it my head. So, any ideas? And is php5 going to be multithreaded? If not, when?:) -- best wishes, Strahil Minev, http://sourceforge.net/users/phuncky/