nice(3UCB) SunOS/BSD Compatibility Library Functions nice(3UCB)NAMEnice - change priority of a process
SYNOPSIS
/usr/ucb/cc [ flag ... ] file ...
#include<unistd.h>
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(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 main‐
tain compatibility with previous versions of this call).
RETURN VALUES
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:
EPERM The value of incr specified was negative, and the effective
user ID is not the privileged user.
SEE ALSOcc(1B), nice(1), renice(1), fork(2), priocntl(2), getpriority(3C)NOTES
Use of these interfaces should be restricted to only applications writ‐
ten on BSD platforms. Use of these interfaces with any of the system
libraries or in multi-threaded applications is unsupported.
SunOS 5.10 30 Oct 2007 nice(3UCB)
