nice(3C) COMPATIBILITY FUNCTIONS 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. Nega-
tive 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.
Last change: BSD Compatibility Package 1