.\" Copyright (c) 1980 Regents of the University of California.
.\" All rights reserved.  The Berkeley software License Agreement
.\" specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution.
.\"
.\"	@(#)nice.3	6.1 (Berkeley) %G%
.\"
.TH NICE 3C ""
.UC 4
.SH NAME
nice \- set program priority
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B nice(incr)
.SH DESCRIPTION
.ft B
This interface is obsoleted by setpriority(2).
.ft R
.PP
The scheduling
priority of the process is augmented by
.IR 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.
.PP
Negative increments are ignored except on behalf of 
the super-user.
The priority is limited to the range
\-20 (most urgent) to 20 (least).
.PP
The priority of a process is
passed to a child process by
.IR fork (2).
For a privileged process to return to normal priority
from an unknown state,
.I nice
should be called successively with arguments
\-40 (goes to priority \-20 because of truncation),
20 (to get to 0),
then 0 (to maintain compatibility with previous versions
of this call).
.SH "SEE ALSO"
nice(1), setpriority(2), fork(2), renice(8)