[Help-bash] Annihilating data

[Paul-Jürgen Wagner]

Dear Bashers,

I have a pipe who's last command ('analyse') should throw away the data 
for a specified amount of time ('end') and then start processing it.  My 
current solution is

function analyse {
        local count=<some sensible number>
        while (( $(date '+%s') < end ))
        do
                dd bs=1024 count=$count status=none iflag=fullblock of=/dev/null
        done
        <now the magic starts>
}

This works reasonably, but I am pretty sure that there is a much smarter 
solution to this, probably by using cat, putting it in the background, 
sleeping for the skip-duration and then killing it?  Any comments or 
tips?

Thanks a lot,

Paul