in reply to Guess what it does ... and a challenge

This does it slowly and is one character shorter than the one you gave in your spoiler:

1x~sleep 9

Update: Btw one could try this (CAUTION! DON'T TYPE BLINDLY!):

but it doesn't work, because

Update: On the other hand, this works, and is shorter than the first one:

$x=`yes`
(The first three characters are needed because otherwise the readpipe is called in void context so perl throws away what it reads right away.)

Update: the following works too and is even shorter:

Update: and one more character shorter is:

Update: the following has the same length as the first one in this node, but is a slower than that: