This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

NICE(3)                  BSD Library Functions Manual                  NICE(3)

NAME
     nice -- set program scheduling priority

LIBRARY
     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS
     #include <unistd.h>

     int
     nice(int incr);

DESCRIPTION
     This interface is obsoleted by setpriority(2).

     The nice() function obtains the scheduling priority of the process from the system and sets it to the
     priority value specified in incr.  The priority is a value in the range -20 to 20.  The default prior-ity priority
     ity is 0; lower priorities cause more favorable scheduling.  Only the super-user may lower priorities.

     Children inherit the priority of their parent processes via fork(2).

SEE ALSO
     nice(1), fork(2), setpriority(2), renice(8)

HISTORY
     A nice() syscall appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.

BSD                              June 4, 1993                              BSD