If I do anything too IO intensive on my Vmware Linux installation (running on MacOSX), it often crashes my VM and the MacOS host along with it, and I have no choice but to powercycle the mac.

This used to happen with my previous Mac too (both work machines, intel generation cpus, not M1/M2.)

Today I crashed my VM/host pair trying to unpack a 4G tar.gz file, and found this great way to throttle the unpacking enough that my machine stayed alive.

My use case was:

# cat master.tar.gz | pv -L 50M | tar zxf -

I’m running RHEL8 on my VM, but was able to find a EPEL pv rpm (pv-1.6.6-7.el8.x86_64.rpm) to install on rpmsearch.