running really nice

Everyone that uses the shell eventually learns about nice – the tool that runs a process at a reduced priority. Well, there is also ionice that allows you to tweak processes from taking over all disk IO.

I added a vnice() function into my ZSH config so I can run or mark processes for lower priority for both nice and ionice levels.

The vnice function can be ran in two modes.

• vnice make

  This will run the make program under lower CPU and IO priorities.

• vnice $(pidof git)

  This will lower the priorities of all processes with the name of git.

Here is the actual code that you can add to your zshrc:

    vnice() {
            if [[ -z "$1" ]] ; then
                    echo "vnice [ <pid>... | <program> ]" >&2
                    return 1
            elif [[ "$1" =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]] ; then
                    while [[ "$1" =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]] ; do
                            ionice -n7 -p $1
                            renice 20 $1
                            shift
                    done
            else
                    ionice -n7 nice -n20 $@
            fi
    }

The above might work under bash, but it has not been tested