Display a running clock in terminal using bash without using loop

Question

How to display a running clock in a linux terminal without using any for or while loop. Using these loops in scripts with 1 sec duration causes a significant load in the systems.

Answer 1

How about:

watch -n 1 date

Use watch to run a command periodically.

Answer 2

This post is ancient, but for anyone still looking for this kind of thing:

#!/bin/bash

printf '\033[;H'
while true; do date; sleep 1; done

This version avoids recursion (and stack faults!) while accomplishing the goal.

(For the record - I do prefer the watch version, but since the OP did not like that solution, I offered an improvement on the other solution.)