NICE(2) NICE(2)
NAME
nice - set program priority
SYNOPSIS
void 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 without flak from the administration. Priority 19
is recommended for programs that should only execute in
``idle'' time.
Only the super-user can effect negative increments. Priori-
ties less than -20 (most urgent) are treated as -20. Prior-
ities greater than 19 are treated as 19.
The priority of a process is passed to a child process by
fork(2). For a privileged process to return to normal prior-
ity from an unknown state, nice should be called succes-
sively with arguments -40 (goes to priority -20 because of
truncation), then 20 (to get to 0).
SEE ALSO
nice(1), fork(2)