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From: lvc@danews.ATT.COM (Larry Cipriani)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Default nice values
Message-ID: <347@danews.ATT.COM>
Date: Fri, 21-Nov-86 17:00:07 EST
Article-I.D.: danews.347
Posted: Fri Nov 21 17:00:07 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Nov-86 23:33:39 EST
References: <3922@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>
Distribution: world
Organization: AT&T Medical Information Systems, Columbus, Oh
Lines: 36
Summary: An undocumented feature of login as a solution
Xref: mnetor comp.unix.questions:169 comp.unix.wizards:161

In article <3922@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>, jbs@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU (Jeff Siegal) writes:
> I'm using BSD 4.3.  I'd like to set something up so that certain users
> are niced to a given value whenever they login.  If possible, I'd like
> them not to be able to increase their priority, but I could live without
> this.  Any ideas welcome.
> 
> Jeff Siegal

I don't know about BSD 4.3 for certain but in System 5 Release 2
there is an undocumented feature of the login program (at least
in my documentation).  You can change a users nice value with some
special characters in the gecos field of their password entry.

Suppose the login entry is:

	name:password,aging:uid:gid:info:home:shell

changing it to:

	name:password,aging:uid:gid:pri=5 info:home:shell

will make their nice value 25 (higher nice but lower priority).

changing it to:

	name:password,aging:uid:gid:pri=-10 info:home:shell

will make their nice value 1 (lower nice but higher priority).

Some systems set the priority of their uucp logins this way.

This was documented in some older versions of UNIX.  Try it out
in BSD and see if it works.

Larry Cipriani
cbsck!lvc