nice(3C-ucb)            (BSD Compatibility Package)            nice(3C-ucb)

NAME
     nice - change priority of a process

SYNOPSIS
     /usr/ucb/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 privi-
     leged 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. For a
     privileged process to return to normal priority from an unknown state,
     nice should be called successively with arguments -40 (goes to prior-
     ity -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.

DIAGNOSTICS
     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
     nice(1), priocntl(1), renice(1-ucb), fork(2), priocntl(2),
     getpriority(3).
















Page 1                       Reliant UNIX 5.44                Printed 11/98