Chrome has always annoyed me when my battery is low, or when I'm low on memory. So I made a quick terminal command that freezes its processes. Of course I use this for pausing any of my apps.
Overview
I added the following bash functions
pause_process(pid) |
nicer kill command that pauses a process (kill -STOP) |
pause_app(string) |
searches for any proccesses with the given string, pausing them all |
As well as the opposing functions resume_app() and resume_process() (which use kill -CONT).
Implementation
First thing I needed was a nice way to work with lists in bash, so I made a function to map a command on each item. Using that I made a function that searches for processes that contain a given string. Then it maps a command on them
function map() {
for pid in `eval $1`; do
$2 ${pid};
done
}
PGREP_FLAGS="-U ${USER}"
function search_map() {
map "pgrep ${PGREP_FLAGS} -f \"$1\"" $2
}
Using this the pause_app() command is quite simple, and the resume_app one as well.
function pause_app() {
echo pausing $1
search_map "$1" pause_process;
}
Usage
Using this just requires knowing part of the app name:
$ pause_app Chrome.app
pausing Chrome.app
pausing: 378
pausing: 406
pausing: 414
$ resume_app Chrome.app
resuming Chrome.app
resuming: 378
resuming: 406
resuming: 414
pgrep will find more that one app if they contain the same text in the process tag.
The best search string is one which contains the entire app name, (or at least the .app prefix)
More Uses
I've also made a bash script that freezes all the processes I consider extraneous to give my computer some resources during clinch moments. pause_all reads a list of app names, mapping the pause script on them all. resume_all does the opposite. You can see it here