Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!sdd.hp.com!mips!sgi!davea@quasar.wpd.sgi.com
From: davea@quasar.wpd.sgi.com (David B. Anderson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: Problems with nice -> should be: Problems with nice man-page.
Summary: nice is csh built-in
Message-ID: <66382@sgi.sgi.com>
Date: 8 Aug 90 15:39:48 GMT
References: <9008080211.aa02949@VGR.BRL.MIL>
Sender: davea@quasar.wpd.sgi.com
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 29

In article <9008080211.aa02949@VGR.BRL.MIL>, XBR2D96D@DDATHD21.BITNET (Knobi der Rechnerschrat) writes:
> Hello,
> 
>   the problem with nice seems to be more a problem with the nice man
> page. There it is silently assumed that you are using /bin/sh as your
> shell. If you use /bin/csh (or derivates like tcsh) things are different.
> 
>  Here are the rules that I have discovered by experiment:
> 
>    shell   def-value   decrease priority  increase priority (as root)
>    ------------------------------------------------------------------
>    sh         10       nice -value          nice --value
>    csh         4       nice +value          nice  -value
> 
>  The '-', '--' and '+' are IMPORTANT. Could somebody at SGI look at
> the man page and correct it for some future release?

Martin Knoblauch has an interesting table here.

``nice'' is a csh built-in and the csh(1) man page accurately gives its
properties.  The csh built-in nice calls setpriority(2) to set the priority
of the victim process.

It might be a nice :-) idea to have the nice(1) man page mention that
csh uses a built-in......

Regards,
[ David B. Anderson  Silicon Graphics  (415)335-1548  davea@sgi.com ]
[``What can go wrong?''                          --Calvin and Hobbes]