Hi, I have a little problem and I cannot find an answer anywhere.
I'm developing my own application in C++ which does lots of calculations and uses FreeGLUT and GTK+. Sometimes I make an error and it gets into a neverending loop. This freezes my entire operating system. Btw. I'm using FC 5 and GNOME. I cannot kill the process, I cannot use mouse or keyboard, so I cannot run another terminal to kill it. It just gets stuck, or extremely slow.
Now, what I need. When starting this process in a terminal, I would need to tell my operating system, that this process is "bad" How can I run this process so that it cannot eat up all computing time of my operating system? Or maybe is there a demon, or something like that, which would kill it after some time? It's so stupid to restart my computer everytime this happens. I usually need two or three runs before I find the mistake.

Thanks for help.
Vasek

Here are some ideas:

- go to a text only console (press control-alt-f1, to return to X press control-alt-f7) and kill the process from there ? Sometimes, even if X is blocked the text console will work.

- ssh into your machine (if you have another machine close). I have seen machines completly blocked in which you could ssh and kill the ofending process

- if you use bash, "man bash" and search for ulimit (press '/' and the the string you want to search. ulimit can limit the resources the shell and it's children will use.

- use nice ("man nice" for more info)

Hope at least one idea works for you

run it at a high nice level, that'll prevent it from hogging all your resources and effectively freezing your computer

nice -n 19 program

Thank you all. nice was exactly what I was looking for. Now it does what it should and my OS already allows me to kill the process.