Need a Linux command that takes much time

Question

Don't ask why, but I would like to know a linux command, besides "la -laR", since that could not take that long according to where you are in the folder structure, that takes much time to complete.

Answer 1

sleep takes up however much time you pass to it.

Answer 2

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null will run until your computer runs out of zeroes. :D

You can also make dd run for a finite amount of time, if you specify count or specify different values for if and/or of.

Or, if you want to do something useful, try badblocks -nvs /dev/sda, which will run a nondestructive read/write test on your first hard disk.

Answer 3

You could also simply repeat a command forever. For instance:

 $ while true ; do date ; done

Answer 4

updatedb this updates the locate database, so this is actually useful to run.

Answer 5

In Bash, the Korn shell and Z shell, you can use the SECONDS special variable if you want to delay for a certain time and avoid using an external tool such as sleep for some reason.

seconds=$SECONDS; while (( $SECONDS < seconds + 10 )); do :; done

or

SECONDS=0; while (( $SECONDS < 10 )); do :; done

The colon (:) is a no-op.

Answer 6

well find can run for a long time especially if you want to do specific task. Here is one command:

find / -size 15c

This will seach for files that have exactly 15 characters (in file that is) and it will scan whole HDD for it. This can be slow but if you use state of art computer then you can use other commands that can run endlessly. We can use find command in a loop:

while true; do find / -size 15c; done

The bad side of this command is that you are using HDD for this and if you run it often it may shorten your HDD life (im not very much HW educated so search on google for more details).

My personal choice for this task would be creating a series of random characters (95 in his case) and print them using infinte loop with this command:

while true; do echo head -c 95 /dev/urandom | tr -dc A-Z-0-9-a-z; done

If you have slow pc then use sleep command to delay the output for 1s (in this case) and save up some cpu power:

while true; do echo head -c 95 /dev/urandom | tr -dc A-Z-0-9-a-z && sleep 1; done