Solved Pausing make buildworld

[hhartzer]

Is there a good way to pause make buildworld? I tried kill -STOP on the original make process, but it kept going as there's lots of nested makes going on.

Ideally, I'd be able to stop (SIGSTOP) it, use the desktop more responsively, then continue (SIGCONT) it.

Thanks!

 

[cracauer@]

I run it in tmux and send Control-Z from the shell.

The difference is that the shell sends SIGSTOP to the entire process group.

You might be able to mcgyver something together with pstree(1).

 

[hhartzer]

I run it in tmux and send Control-Z from the shell.

The difference is that the shell sends SIGSTOP to the entire process group.

You might be able to mcgyver something together with pstree(1).

Now that is that way to do it. I should've thought of that.

Thank you!

 

[sdalu]

It's not pausing, but I use nice and idprio on a screen it makes the whole make buildworld less resource demanding and keep my desktop more responsive.

/usr/bin/nice -n 20 /usr/sbin/idprio 30 screen

 

[tembun]

As cracauer@ already mentioned, the key thing is to send the signal to the process group, rather than to a single process.

Just want to suggest an another way of doing this: a kill(1) utility can send a signal to the all processes in the group. It is done via specifying -PGID as pid argument, where PGID is a process group id. You can retrieve it using j option for ps(1): ps jax will print the PGID in the 4th column. So, bringing all that together, (let's assume your process group id is 4997) kill -STOP -- -4997 should do the thing. Notice this -- double dash before specifying -4997. Without that, shell will treat 4997 as an option, whereas we, in fact, want the shell to treat the whole -4997 (with leading minus) as an option.

Artem