NICE(3C)                             BSD                              NICE(3C)



NAME
     nice - set program priority

SYNOPSIS
     nice(incr)

DESCRIPTION
     This interface is obsoleted by setpriority(2).

     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 super-user.  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).

SEE ALSO
     nice(1), setpriority(2), fork(2), renice(8)