Here's my last one (find half of the free memory to feed into a stress testing tool): stress --vm-bytes $(awk '/MemFree/{printf "%d\n", $2 * 0.5;}' < /proc/mem

Here's my last one (find half of the free memory to feed into a stress testing tool): stress --vm-bytes $(awk '/MemFree/{printf "%d\n", $2 * 0.5;}' < /proc/meminfo)k --vm-keep -m 1 It's like playing terminal history awk roulette :)