Talk:nice (Unix)

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Nice and renice[edit]

and the difference between renice and nice is????? - that should certainly be in the article, since both link there. --62.41.129.19 20:51, 11 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I just came across this page today and I'd be glad to update it with a section for 'renice.' I don't think that quite merits its own article...but the way it's setup now, with 'renice' just pointing to 'nice,' doesn't seem very professional.

Haha, I'm new to this Wiki thing. =p Andewulfe 05:07, 13 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Redo this page[edit]

This really needs to be redone. There is some incorrect info in this article. nice goes from 19 to -19. See Unix SystemV by Ken Sobel. Also see your Linux documentation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Spectre65 (talk • contribs) 04:25, 21 November 2006

That depends on the OS - AIX nice manpage shows this:

ADJUST is 10 by default.  Range goes from -20 (highest priority) to 19 (lowest).

--Unixguy 10:52, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

But what does it say for renice(1)? My nice(1) page agrees with yours but the renice page says the range is -20 to 20. Additionally, my kernel defines PRIO_MIN=-20 and PRIO_MAX=20. It may be that PRIO_MIN<=niceness<PRIO_MAX, but I don't see anything to that effect anywhere. hikeda (talk) 23:18, 23 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

C bindings[edit]

I'm afraid I don't understand the C example - is it intended to indicate the manpage? Because it isn't C code; but 'man getpriority' on my system gives

    int
    getpriority(int which, int who);

in section 2, so getpriority(2) would make sense but no with that signature. 86.6.2.185 23:33, 6 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

History of the name[edit]

I think it would be great if someone could find the history of why this command and concept is called "nice" and why they diddnt just call it "priority" or something like that. Mkid1 (talk) 22:25, 25 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes, though perhaps only in fiction, people faced by a threatening dog will nervously attempt to soothe it by saying things like "nice dog", or "nice doggy". I speculate that there is a hint of humour behind the naming, having users give commands like "nice bzip2 largefile", in an attempt to "pacify" the program, and stop it aggressively hogging the system resources. CountingPine (talk) 19:17, 3 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A poor description[edit]

This article has existed since 2004 and has never once actually described what nice does. The main thing that nice actually does is invoke/execute a utility, yet nowhere in this article do we mention that. It only talks about how it changes process priorities. Kaldari (talk) 22:38, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've tried to fix the lead to be more clear about how nice is actually used. Kaldari (talk) 22:51, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]