Bump up the Power, Captain

There is a Terminal hack I’ve been looking for, for a good long while. It is a UNIX command that allows you to tell your Mac to bump an individual app’s priority in the process list. I don’t know the actual Technical way to put it… but Adam Curry once (in the early DSC days) mentioned he’d found out how to do this and was utilising this hack when recording his Podcast, so every other application had to get in line behind his recording suite.

In Windows XP, you can do this by CMD-ALT-DEL-ing and then right clicking the application name, and setting Priority: High, Low, Realtime. I’m having no luck with the search engine’s because I don’t know how to word this process. Maybe I’ll e-mail Captain Curry (hmm, certainly Private Pilot Curry, he’s a priest too- indeed) he’ll know how to bump my sluggish iPhoto into something more useable (trying to make a book for the first time).

btw. i’m obviously hoping mr. C will find this himself via Technorati and leave a comment, or mail me the answer as my e-mail has as much chance as our olde Podcast being stuck on the iTunes Store’s front page. by the way, doesn’t the PodShow network look snazzy, almost worth making another podcast to go along with this pretty page. ;-)

4 Responses to “Bump up the Power, Captain”


  1. 1 Adam C

    use the nice command

    man nice from the command line in Terminal.

    AC

  2. 2 Callum

    thanks Adam, or should i say; nice. :D

  3. 3 icerabbit
  4. 4 Callum

    cheers icerabbit, i’ve been playing around with tiger for a week or two - got scratched a few times, but there you go!

    that app is the bomb! i love it truely and will keep it handy from now on. the terminal command is quite a drag, and CS 2 is such a drain… thank you!

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