Slow: Live life in the slow lane

slow limits the output rate of a command to a specified bits/second. It can be used as a simple filter for stdout/stdin, but it can also be used to wrap interactive tools.

Why?

I acquired a VT220 terminal (max speed: 19200 bps) and wanted it to display some dynamic information (scrolling banners, graphs, etc). I wasn't always near the terminal, and I wanted a way to verify that the things I was trying to do weren't going to fall over at slower character rates.

As a simple filter

Slow can be used as a simple filter for stdout:

slow -b 1200 date

Or for stdout + stdin:

echo foo | slow -b 1200 -i sed s/foo/bar/

Wrapping interactive programs

Slow is even more fun when you use it to wrap an interactive program like a shell:

slow -b 1200 -it bash

Demo

License

Copyright (C) 2024 Lars Kellogg-Stedman [email protected]

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.