suspending processes (kill -STOP)

[James Helman]

Even though our IRISes' primary purpose in life is 3-D graphics, they
get used quite a bit for numerical computatations because they're much
faster than anything else we have (there's a Conves in the building,
but it's not ours).  Also, our diehard FORTRAN users can't do anything
our Suns anymore because we never got around to ordering Sun's FORTRAN
compiler after Sun uncerimoniously unbundled it.

But the numeric computation is basically a parasitic use.  We'd like
to be able to suspend computational jobs when running graphics.
Nicing isn't enough, especially if the other jobs are pounding I/O.

Under BSD, one could just "kill -STOP" a process and then "kill -CONT"
it later.  But under IRIX, if the process is no longer connected to a
tty, "kill -STOP" causes the process to exit.

Is there any way to suspend a process under IRIX?

Jim Helman
Department of Applied Physics			6 Trillium Lane
Stanford University				San Carlos, CA 94070
(jim at thrush.stanford.edu) 			(415) 723-9127