The Need for Pulse
------------------
Pulse is a small program which I wrote out of necessity.  I deliberately
made it very simple and at the same time very useful.  I needed a way to
measure the amount of time I was online and didnt know of any way to do it
in Linux.  The only thing I was able to do was to log the starting and
ending time of my PPP session.  This meant that I had to manually
calculate the total amount of time I spent in each session: this was not
too appealing.

Whereas my method for computing online time might not have been the best,
pulse provided me with a means to accomplish my goals.  It is possible
that pulse could help you achieve your goals in a similar fashion.

How Pulse Works
---------------
Pulse basically outputs a dot `.' to the screen after a user-defined
interval.  The functionality of this is that if this stream of dots is
redirected to a file, the size of the file determines the length of time
that Pulse has been running.

How to Use Pulse
----------------
The syntax of pulse is given below:

    pulse -d <D> -h <H> -m <M> -s <S>

  or

    pulse

The meaning of the switches is pretty much self-explanatory, but here
goes:

   -d <D> : Wait for D number of days between dots.
   -h <H> : Wait for H number of hours between dots.
   -m <M> : Wait for M number of minutes between dots.
   -s <S> : Wait for S number of seconds between dots.

Multiple switches results in addition of the time intervals specified.
So, `pulse -h 1 -m 30' results in one dot being printed out after every
one hour and thirty minutes.

Invoking pulse without any arguments at all has the same meaning as
`pulse -s 1' i.e. one dot after every second.

I hope you find this program useful.  If you have any suggestions for
improvements, please email me the details.

--Shahbaz Javeed <sjaveed@bigfoot.com>
  http://www.bigfoot.com/~sjaveed
  April 1999
