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Joseph Turian
Asked: 2010-03-17 09:40:49 +0800 CST

Unix command to suspend a job while there is console activity?

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I want to do a large disk transfer, which slows down responsiveness of my system.

What I want is a Unix command that will only run the command after I have been idle at the console for a few minutes. And if I come back half way in, it will suspend the job. Until I walk away from my computer.

Is there such a command, or software package?

[edit: The key part of this question is how to determine if there is console activity, to automatically suspend.]

hard-drive console suspend

5 Answers

  1. You can achieve this by first getting the process PID with:

    ps aux | grep <process_name>

    write down the PID (it's the second column), then suspend it with:

    kill -STOP <pid>

    and continue it with:

    kill -CONT <pid>
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  2. How about just running the command normally, and then using "nice" on it to lower its priority?

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  3. I once wrote a "pause_io" script that would accept a number and then pgrep all the types of things that are likely to whomp my IO, e.g. rsync, updatedb, and cp. Then it would kill -STOP those pids and sleep for the supplied number of minutes and then kill -CONT each of them. When I needed responsive access to the box I would execute

        pause_io 10 &

    And I would have 10 minutes without heavy I/O

    It went something like this:

        #!/bin/bash

    TIMEOUT=$(($1*60))
    TASKS="mlocate|updatedb|rsync|cp"

    pkill $TASKS -signal STOP
    sleep $TIMEOUT
    pkill $TASKS -signal CONT
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  4. rsync has a --bwlimit option.

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  5. Run the suggested -STOP and -CONT as part of some screen-saver maybe?

    (If you're on a terminal: There's also a screen-saver for terminals, but I don't know its name, or where to set its options. All I know is, that it's on by default on Ubuntu :-)

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