Why not use pv -L ?

[q2dg]

I can't see the usefulness of trickle existing this other well-known alternative I'd glad to be lighted. Thanks!

[sjmulder]

I wasn't aware of this pv feature, thanks for mentioning it. Now I feel twofold. First, this little project is borne out of curiosity and intended to be interesting more than useful. But it's useful to me because I enjoy playing with it. In hindsight, that curiosity might have been satisfied by pv.

Secondly, I refer to Pike and Kerninghan's 1984 paper Program design in the Unix environment.

It makes a case for keeping responsibilities between Unix programs separate: one program for concatenating things, another for numbering lines, and so on. In line of that thinking I feel that pipe throughput limiting is not the responsibility of a pipe visualiser and should be a different program.

Probably not trickle though, because that's expressly intended to only simulate very low bitrates. It doesn't account for nanosleep() inaccuracy or overhead either.

[q2dg]

Ok, thanks a lot for your explanation! If you don't mind, I'll close the issue, then

[sjmulder]

Cheers!