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     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)