Want to do something like “cp big_file copy_of_big_file” or “tar xfz big_tarball.tar.gz” but without thrashing your cache?
Enrico Zini has a nice little LD_PRELOAD called nocache.
$ nocache tar xfz foo.tar.gz
Goes well with libeatmydata. A pair of tools for compensating for your Operating System casually hating you.
I imagine people will love this when taking database backups.
(Commenting here because I can’t there…)
Very cute, you could even think of it as cachenice. ;-)
There is also this from Andrew Morton:
http://lwn.net/Articles/224653/