flood

Rapidly invoke (flood) a command.

• Website: https://github.com/sjmulder/flood
• Video: https://asciinema.org/a/sriM9Wrp44rkzPsC7IRYsSBrA
• Homebrew tap (macOS): https://github.com/nickolasburr/homebrew-pfa

Usage

flood [-d delay] [-j maxjobs] [-n count] command [argument ...]

flood repeatedly invokes a command with a short delay between invocations. It does not wait for previous invocations to finish. Output is discarded, but results are summarily reported using single characters:

Character	Meaning
.	Command invoked
*	Command completed successfully
!	Command completed with an error status
@	Error invoking the command

A tally of the number of invocations, successes and failures is printed when the program terminates, by SIGINT (Ctrl+C) or otherwise, or when sent SIGINFO (Ctrl+T) on supported systems like BSD and macOS.

The name and inspiration come from the ping(1) -f option.

The following options are supported:

-d delay

Minimum delay between command executions, in miliseconds. Defaults to 100 (10 per second).

-j maxjobs

Limits the number of simultaneously running commands. Once reached, flood waits for previously invoked commands to complete before starting a new one. Defaults to 0, which means no limit.

-n count

Limits the total number of command invocations. Once reached, flood waits for all previously launched commands to complete, prints a tally, and exits. Defaults to 0, which means no limit.

Examlpes

Flood example.com with 100 requests using curl(1) then print a tally:

$ flood -n100 curl example.com

Repeatedly run the sleep(1) utility as quickly as possible, but never have more than 10 running at the same time:

$ flood -d0 -j10 sleep 1

Building

Should build without changes on Unix-like systems. If not, please file an issue on GitHub. To build:

make

There are install and uninstall targets, too. PREFIX is set to /usr/local by default.

Author

By Sijmen J. Mulder (ik@sjmulder.nl)