TASKPOLICY(8)

💅 TASKPOLICY(8) — like, the taskpolicy manual, but make it make sense 💅

okay bestie, welcome to taskpolicy from the System Manager's Manual section 8 — she's a lil utility with main character energy and she's about to rearrange your process's whole vibe ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

taskpolicy — run a program with a different I/O or scheduling policy, or tweak the settings on a process that's already running 🫶

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

taskpolicy [-d policy] [-g policy] [-c clamp] [-b] [-t thruput_tier]
           [-l latency_tier] [-a] [-s] [-S shims] [-m limit] [-j pri]
           program [arg1 [...]]
taskpolicy [-b|-B] [-t thruput_tier] [-l latency_tier] [-p pid]

Two whole modes, two whole moods, we love a flexible icon 💖

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So taskpolicy lowkey uses the setiopolicy_np(3) and setpriority(2) APIs to launch a program with altered I/O or scheduling policies. And the nepo-baby energy is real: all children of the specified program also inherit these policies. 🧚 Whole family gets the same treatment, periodt.

taskpolicy accepts the following flags and arguments:

• -d policy — runs the program after calling setiopolicy_np(3) with an iotype of IOPOL_TYPE_DISK, a scope of IOPOL_SCOPE_PROCESS, and whatever policy you passed. The argument can be an integer, or a symbolic string like "default" or "throttle" — and it's interpreted case-insensitively, so don't stress about your caps lock 🙈
• -g policy — runs the program after calling setiopolicy_np(3) with an iotype of IOPOL_TYPE_DISK, a scope of IOPOL_SCOPE_DARWIN_BG, and the policy you specified. Same deal as -d for the argument, interpreted identically 💫
• -c clamp — runs the program using the specified QoS clamp. The argument can be "utility", "background", or "maintenance", interpreted case-insensitively 🎚️
• -p pid — changes settings for the process specified by pid. That's the "already running" mode, iykyk 🔥
• -m limit — runs the program with the specified memory limit (in MiB) 🍓
• -j pri — runs the program at the specified jetsam priority 💀
• -P pcontrol — runs the program with the specified process control action, which the system may invoke upon resource exhaustion. Valid options include "kill", "throttle", and "suspend" — so yeah, pick your fighter 😭
• -S shims — runs the program with security transition shims in effect 🛡️
• -b — runs the program after calling setpriority(2) with a priority of PRIO_DARWIN_BG 🌙
• -B — moves the target process out of PRIO_DARWIN_BG. the glow-up 🦋
• -t — sets the throughput tier of the process to thruput_tier ⚡
• -l — sets the latency tier of the process to latency_tier ⏱️
• -a — runs the program with the resource management policies given to applications 👑
• -s — runs the program with an initial suspended state by calling posix_spawnattr_setflags(3) with POSIX_SPAWN_START_SUSPENDED 🧊

fr fr, every single one of those is a real flag — don't come for me if you skimmed, bestie 💅

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

setpriority(2), posix_spawnattr_setflags(3), setiopolicy_np(3)

and that's the whole page, no cap 💜 this lil legend lives on Darwin, dated February 21, 2013 — vintage but still iconic, and yes she's still TASKPOLICY(8) at the top and bottom of every page, slay 💖✨