nice(3C) UNIX System V(BSD Compatibility Package) nice(3C)
NAME
nice - change priority of a process
SYNOPSIS
cc [ flag. . . ] file . . . -lucb
int nice(incr)
int 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 undue impact on
system performance.
Negative increments are illegal, except when specified by the privileged
user. The priority is limited to the range -20 (most urgent) to 20
(least). Requests for values above or below these limits result in the
scheduling priority being set to the corresponding limit.
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).
RETURN VALUE
Upon successful completion, nice returns 0. Otherwise, a value of -1 is
returned and errno is set to indicate the error.
ERRORS
The priority is not changed if:
EACCES The value of incr specified was negative, and the effective
user ID is not the privileged user.
SEE ALSO
renice(1M)
nice(1), priocntl(2) in the User's Reference Manual
fork(2), getpriority(2), priocntl(2) in the Programmer's Reference Manual
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