NAME

nice − set program priority

SYNOPSIS

nice(incr)
int incr;

DESCRIPTION

The scheduling priority of the process is augmented by incr. Positive priorities get less service than normal.

Negative increments are ignored except on behalf of the super-user.  The priority is limited to the range 0 (most urgent) to 120 (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 with the argument −120 to change it from lowest priority to highest, no matter what priority it actually possessed.  It should then be called with the argument 20 to get to the normal default priority. 

EXAMPLE

nice(-120); nice(20);

would return you to the default priority. 

SEE ALSO

fork(2), nice(1)

7th Edition  —  1/21/82