UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello, I've been searching for something that slows down a process for some time now. Slow down as in make time pass by slower. I have rarely turned to asking a forum in the past but at this point I've given up.

For example: if I made a program that would print "Hello" in 5 seconds, I would use this time slower to instead print "Hello" much later, maybe 10 seconds later, maybe 5 minutes later, maybe 5 days later, or maybe even allow it to be 5 seconds later.

I found a open source program that does the opposite: make time FASTER. This program is called warp and is developed by Glenn Fowler at AT&T Labs Research. This program is a .so file that you load and you specify the time multiplier and offset in a environment variable called "WARP". This is pretty neat and all, and ideally I'd like a program that can go either way, make time faster or slower, and I'd also be really cool if you could specify an offset, like you do with Glenn's warp, but I guess I'm really just looking for the make time go slower part right now.

Thanks for the help.

Code:

$ date && printf '%s' "H" && sleep 5 && printf '%s\n' "ello" && date
vendredi 4 novembre 2011, 12:18:56 (UTC+0100)
Hello
vendredi 4 novembre 2011, 12:19:01 (UTC+0100)
$

Just replace sleep 5 with sleep $1 in your script

Do you want to just delay the process? Or do you want to slow down processing?

The former can be done with sleep, cron, or at.
To slow down processing, you could use cpulimit, which limits CPU usage by pausing and resuming the process using signals. Note that that probably won't influence timer-based events.

what about changing its priority (e.g with nice )?

What iI ment was, as previous post seems to suggest, what purpose for what? why cant a simple nice suffice, you may have good reasons but we dont know...

Can you put a <1 multiplier into warp to slow it down, or does it have to be an integer?

This kind of trickery, making date() return incorrect values, may have unpredictable results if your program actually uses date() for anything important.

Thanks for the help everybody, but sleep, cron, at, cpulimit, and nice do not slow time down.

Yes, I've tried and it must be a Integer. The program is written in c so I looked at the code and the number parsing function thing does not handle decimal values, and the number is stored as an integer. I don't really have any knowledge with c, but I think I should be able to replace every place it tries to store the the number as an integer and tell it to make it store it as a decimal number instead, and then redo the number parsing function so that it parses the part after the decimal point. I think that would only work if the integer math is the same as decimal number math. Maybe I should ask the developer for help but the last update was almost 10 years ago.

So far it looks predictable with modifying the date, and it seems like this should always be true as long as the program asks the system for the current date. Oh and I am trying to change something "important" so I already assumed the risk of breaking my computer.

If you could link me to the source, I'd take a look.