Windows Tip: Launching a low priority process
A friend of mine who is a petroleum engineer recently told me about a problem he was having. He was launching a series of batch jobs (big simulation jobs) on his Windows XP workstation from the command line by running a batch file that contained a series of commands like job5.exe -i input.dat, and his problem was that these jobs were hogging so much of his machine's processing power that foreground tasks became unresponsive. Once these processes were running however, he could open Task Manager and change their priority to Low, and then he could work normally on the machine while the jobs ran in the background. He was wondering if there was a way to start an application with Low priority instead of Normal. It turns out there are several solutions to this problem.
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Parameters
Please show an example of how to launch a command in low priority where the command includes parameters that must be specified in quotes (e.g. parameters that are filenames with spaces)Yes please.
Yes please.Solution
OK, the solution to the first poster's problem is to put some text (it doesn't matter what) in quotes before any of the other quoted stuff. As good a place as any to put it is right after the START clause.The reason is that the START command automatically assumes the first quoted string is the name you want to give the new window. Regardless of whatever the first quoted string is actually supposed to do.
Bad design decision on Microsoft's part. They should have made it so that the name of the new window follows an actual flag. But they didn't. So we have to fix their mistake.