NAME

nice − change priority of a process

SYNOPSIS

nice(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 undue impact on system performance.

Negative increments are illegal, except when specified by the super-user.  The priority is limited to the range −20 (most urgent) to 19 (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).

RETURN VALUE

Upon successful completion, nice returns the new scheduling priority.  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, or greater than 40, and the effective user ID is not super-user. 

SEE ALSO

nice(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2), fork(2), renice(8)

Sun Release 3.2  —  Last change: 22 May 1986