NICE

NICE

NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION RETURN VALUE ERRORS CONFORMING TO NOTES SEE ALSO

NAME

nice - change process priority

SYNOPSIS

#include

int nice(int inc);

DESCRIPTION

nice adds inc to the nice value for the calling pid. (A large nice value means a low priority.) Only the super- user may specify a negative increment, or priority increase.

RETURN VALUE

On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

EPERM

A non-super user attempts to do a priority increase by supplying a negative inc.

CONFORMING TO

SVr4, SVID EXT, AT

NOTES

Note that the routine is documented in SUSv2 to return the new nice value, while the Linux syscall and (g)libc (earlier than glibc 2.2.4) routines return 0 on success. The new nice value can be found using getpriority(2). Note that an implementation in which nice returns the new nice value can legitimately return -1. To reliably detect an error, set errno to 0 before the call, and check its value when nice returns -1.

SEE ALSO

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