[Yawn]

I'm using RedHat Enterprise Linux. We have dozens of instances of the same program running at the same time (in a big 'at' queue). I want to be able to suspend one or several to free up CPU time for others. Unfortunately since they all carry the same process name I don't know which one is which.

The programs are launched from different directories and write to different files though. Is there any way of linking a PID to the location it was launched from or linking a PID to a file it is writing to?

And once I have the PID, is there a simple command to suspend it and free up a CPU core? Basically I'm looking for something like what ctrl-z would do for the foreground process. And how do you later continue a suspended process?

[Simon]

lsof will show a list of open files and the processes reading/writing to/from those files.

Do something like

code:

lsof | grep "/one/of/my/subdirectories/"

to see which process is writing to the file within that directory.

[Chuckit]

You can get a list of the full paths of all running processes, their arguments and their PIDs with the following command: ps -awwx -o pid -o command

You can suspend it like control-Z with a SIGSTOP: kill -stop pid

And resume it with the corresponding SIGCONT.

[Yawn]

thanks for the suggestions guys.

lsof and kill -stop work like a charm