NICE(2) NICE(2) NAME nice - set program priority 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 without flak from the administration. Negative increments are ignored except on behalf of the super-user. The priority is limited to the range -20 (most urgent) to 20 (least). 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), 20 (to get to 0), then 0 (to maintain compati- bility with previous versions of this call). SEE ALSO nice(1) ASSEMBLER (nice = 34.) (priority in r0) sys nice