NAME

nice − set program priority

SYNOPSIS

nice(incr)

DESCRIPTION

The scheduling priority of the process is augmented by incr. Positive priorities get less service than normal. Priority 10 is recommended to users who wish to execute long-running programs without flak from the administration.

Negative increments are ignored except on behalf of the superuser.  The priority is limited to the range −20 (most urgent) to 20 (least). 

The priority of a process is passed to a child process by fork(2). For a privileged process to return to normal priority from an unknown state, nice should be called successively with arguments −40 (goes to priority −20 because of truncation), 20 (to get to 0), then 0 (to maintain compatibility with previous versions of this call). 

DIAGNOSTICS

Nice will fail and the process’s scheduling priority remain the same if:

[EPERM] Incr is negative and the process’s effective user ID is not the superuser. 

SEE ALSO

nice(1)

ASSEMBLER

(nice = 34.) 
(priority in r0)
sys nice