If you’ve ever wanted to run a bandwidth intensive command (for example downloading system updates) but limit how much of the available bandwidth it can actually use then trickle may be what you’re after.

Simply install it using

sudo apt-get install trickle

and then you can use it with the following syntax

trickle -d X -u Y command

where X is download limit in KB/s, Y is the upload limit in KB/s and command is the process you want to start limited to these bandwidth constraints. For example if I wanted to start a download of the latest (as of this writing) AMD64 VirtualBox for Ubuntu using wget but limit it to only using 50KB/s down and 20KB/s up then I would run

trickle -d 50 -u 20 wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.0.14/virtualbox-5.0_5.0.14-105127~Ubuntu~trusty_amd64.deb

I should point out that trickle does it’s best to limit the bandwidth to what you select but often won’t be exact in how it does this. Either way it is another cool little tool for your Linux toolbox.

This post originally appeared on my website here.