I originally wrote this script in order to slow down my downloads from the Internet, a few years back when I only had 0.5 Mbit/s downstream. Doing downloads in the background was painful because all available bandwidth was consumed by the download. Using a browser at the same time felt like going to back to using a dial-up modem. So I wrote a sort of "netcat" type of program that could insert small time delays between the packets. I would start by downloading a large file on a remote server, and then I would use "skyffla.pl" to slowly copy it to my home machine while reserving some bandwidth for surfing, telnetting, etc.
Nowadays I don't use the delay option anymore, but I still use the script
quite a lot as a sort of lightweight, customizable "netcat". Especially
on older machines where scp is a CPU hog.
Source code: skyffla.pl.