in reply to 2 basic questions
Just playing, may not work in your character set:
perl -le "while(1){$a=$a?$a:ord'a';print chr$a;$a=++$a%ord'{';sleep 1} +" [download]
This probably will though
perl -le "$_='x';while(1){s/aa/a/;print$_++;sleep 1}" [download]
Cheers,R.