It is possible to specify a date format string that will produce truly
unreasonable amounts of output:
$ date +`python -c 'print("%2147483648c" * 10000)'`
(the format string here is 10,000 repetitions of "%2147483648c"). This will
produce around 20,000GiB of output (20TiB). On my system, producing 10
repetitions takes 33 seconds, so the full 10,000 would take about 9 hours. A
repetition factor of 11000 did not work on my system due to the operating
system limitation on the total size of arguments.
I noticed that another implementation of time (uutils) caps the field width of
any given "resource specifier" at 255 characters, meaning that the biggest
length of output is probably under 10MiB (but still a non trivial amount of
output)
Jeff
