We all know... nice -n19 for low CPU priority.   ionice -c3 for low I/O priority.   nocache can be useful in related scenarios, when we operate on very large files just a single time, e.g. a backup job. It advises the kernel that no caching is required for the involved files, so our current file cache is not erased, potentially decreasing performance on other, more typical file I/O, e.g. on a desktop.   http://askubuntu.com/questions/122857 https://github.com/Feh/nocache http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=nocache http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=nocache   To undo caching of a single file in hindsight, you can do cachedel <OneSingleFile>   To check the cache status of a file, do cachestats <OneSingleFile>

I needed a way to search all files in a web directory that contained a certain string, and replace that string with another string. In the example, I am searching for "askapache" and replacing that string with "htaccess". I wanted this to happen as a cron job, and it was important that this happened as fast as possible while at the same time not hogging the CPU since the machine is a server. So this script uses the nice command to run the sh shell with the command, which makes the whole thing run with priority 19, meaning it won't hog CPU processing. And the -P5 option to the xargs command means it will run 5 separate grep and sed processes simultaneously, so this is much much faster than running a single grep or sed. You may want to do -P0 which is unlimited if you aren't worried about too many processes or if you don't have to deal with process killers in the bg. Also, the -m1 command to grep means stop grepping this file for matches after the first match, which also saves time. Show Sample Output

Check out the usage of 'trap', you may not have seen this one much. This command provides a way to schedule commands at certain times by running them after sleep finishes sleeping. In the example 'sleep 2h' sleeps for 2 hours. What is cool about this command is that it uses the 'trap' builtin bash command to remove the SIGHUP trap that normally exits all processes started by the shell upon logout. The 'trap 1' command then restores the normal SIGHUP behaviour. It also uses the 'nice -n 19' command which causes the sleep process to be run with minimal CPU. Further, it runs all the commands within the 2nd parentheses in the background. This is sweet cuz you can fire off as many of these as you want. Very helpful for shell scripts.