HP-UX Reference (11i v1 05/09) - 1 User Commands N-Z (vol 2)

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nice(1) nice(1)

from a login shell whose current nice value is 20 spawns a subshell with a system nice value of 30.

Attempting to use

nice --2 ksh

from the new shell to spawn another subshell whose system nice value would be 28, is rejected (unless the

user has appropriate privileges), even though the resulting system nice value would be less than the prior-

ity of the original login shell process.

The system nice value for current processes is listed under the

NI column produced by the ps -l com-

mand (see ps(1)).

Background Processes

Foreground processes are run at same system nice value as the parent shell. Background processes

spawned by

ksh run at the equivalent of a

nice -4 by default. If a background process is started via

nice from ksh, any priority_change speciﬁed in the

nice command is added to default nice -4. Thus

the command

nice 12 command &

runs at a system nice value of 36 if executed from ksh.

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES

Environment Variables

LC_MESSAGES determines the language in which messages are displayed.

If LC_MESSAGES is not speciﬁed in the environment or is set to the empty string, the value of

LANG is

used as a default for each unspeciﬁed or empty variable. If

LANG is not speciﬁed or is set to the empty

string, a default of "C" (see lang(5)) is used instead of

LANG.

If any internationalization variable contains an invalid setting,

nice behaves as if all internationalization

variables are set to "C". See environ(5).

International Code Set Support

Single- and multi-byte character code sets are supported.

RETURN VALUE

nice returns the value returned by command.

EXAMPLES

The following examples assume the current process is running with a system nice value of 20 and

nice is

executed from the Korn shell (see ksh(1)).

Run a program named

prog in the current directory at the default priority_change of 10 (system nice

value of 30):

nice ./prog prog_args

Run the same program in the background using a system nice value of 36 (priority_change=12 plus 4 for

the Korn shell):

nice -12 ./prog prog_args &

As a user with appropriate privileges, run prog as a foreground process with a system nice value of 6:

nice --14 ./prog prog_args

WARNINGS

The C shell, csh, has a built-in nice command with different syntax. See csh(1) for details.