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My special laptop tends to overheat and shutdown under Linux unless I cpulimit demanding programs. Would there be a problem with using cpulimit to limit fsck?

Basically, the target process, which you can specify by pid, name, or command line, is continuosly paused and resumed by sending it SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals. Signals are sent by cpulimit in appropriate moments, based on the limit specified by user and the process statistics read from /proc.

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Wouldn't you rather just solve the heat problem instead? – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Mar 10 '11 at 10:51
@Ignacio: Of course, but that problem is not as urgent. – user67194 Mar 10 '11 at 10:53
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fsck is largely IO bound so I don't see what cpu limiting it will achieve. – Majenko Mar 10 '11 at 10:56
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No, there is no problem with limiting CPU percentage. Limiting CPU time would be really problematic, especially if process will be terminated after exceeding CPU time limitation.

cpulimit tries to limit CPU usage rate (not time), which is fine.

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I do disagree.

When you have a broken leg using anesthetic will cease the pain but not solve the problem and things will just go worse.

It's time to solve that heat problem (if that's the problem)... I'd suggest also a further investigation of both cpu and gpu temperature and disk's health with the tools provided in Hiren's boot cd (so you'll exclude existing software problems): http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd or any similar disgnostic cd

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Well, you are free to disagree. To original question (is it safe to limit it), answer is yes. When extending the question (is it good idea to solve this problem with...), then no, it's not good solution. On the other hand, fixing the heat problem isn't always feasible (out-of-warranty, too old, only temporary solution, and so on). – Olli Mar 21 '11 at 8:59
You're right: focus should be on answering the specific question and, additionaly, suggest anything else... I'll do my future answers better: thanks :) – Pitto Mar 21 '11 at 13:22
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