How to restrict CPU usage??

[jyoti100in]

hi,
i have RHL9 running as root. another user is running a shell script that gets into infinite loop and consumes almost 100% of the CPU usage. So i want to restrict the user to run such program?? If such resctrictions cannot be placed, then can i restrict the CPU usage to say 30% or 40%?
Thanks
Jyoti

[sether]

This sounds very much like a homework question, but I could be wrong. Just to be safe, I'm not going to directly answer the question, but instead point you in the right direction. Here are a couple places to start:

man nice
man limits.conf
/etc/security/limits.conf

If that doesn't help, Google those terms above and/or something of the like. Those references should be enough to answer your questions though. Hope this helps.

[scm]

AFAIK you can't restrict based on CPU usage but you can limit the time a process can run for - ulimit(1) is the facility, part of the shell's environment. man bash for details.

[sether]

AFAIK you can't restrict based on CPU usage but you can limit the time a process can run for - ulimit(1) is the facility, part of the shell's environment. man bash for details.

Ah, I forgot about ulimit.