nice(3BSD)           (BSD System Compatibility)           nice(3BSD)


       NAME
             nice - (BSD) change priority of a process

       SYNOPSIS
             /usr/ucb/cc [flag . . . ] file . . .
             int nice(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 want to execute long-running
             programs without undue impact on system performance.

             Negative increments are invalid, 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.

       REFERENCES
             fork(2), getpriority(3BSD), nice(1), priocntl(2), renice(1),
             renice(1M_BSD)








                           Copyright 1994 Novell, Inc.               Page 1