Well, this scenario was refering to ChucK running without sound. This means that in a minute of real time ChucK could potentially be generating a hour (or several....) worth of sound to disk.

Type this at your terminal, just for kicks;

chuck --silent --loop

This will make ChucK do nothing as fast as it can and indeed take about 100% cpu time doing so. I imagine it could do loads of chuckian time per objective minute that way and it would become kinda hard to make cron timing refer to chuckian time.

More sensible -to me- would be scheduling ChucK itself to run when it's time to wake up. You could even make a snooze function that would silence it for five minutes after hitting the keyboard. This will also take care of tf the "stopping all shreds" question; By the time you stopped them manually you're probably awake.