Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 09:51:09 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: "Hr.Ladavac" <lada@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at> Cc: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de>, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, csubl@csv.warwick.ac.uk Subject: Re: Priorities? Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.94.961028094254.717B-100000@covina.lightside.com> In-Reply-To: <199610281236.AA292366197@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at>
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On Mon, 28 Oct 1996, Hr.Ladavac wrote: > E-mail message from Wolfram Schneider contained: > > J. Wunsch writes: > > >`idleprio' processes are being scheduled only if absolutely no other > > >processes are runnable, and the system would otherwise enter the idle > > >loop. Thus, they are good e.g. for X11 screen savers. > > > > I remembered my department defined a 'xlock' icon in .fvwmrc > > for new users. They used 'nice -20 xlock'. It was a disaster > > on X terminals, nobody can login because the server for the X > > terminals are never idle. > > No wonder. nice -20 is the *highest* priority (aside from rtprio > processes). What they wanted was nice +20 xlock (the lower the nice > value, the higher the priority of the process; it makes sense: the nicer > the process, the lesser it influences the other processes). No, the original post is correct. In typical confusing UNIX terminology, "nice -20 xlock" will set the priority to 20 (a very low priority). If you're using /usr/bin/nice (which fvwm will, because it uses /bin/sh to execute commands), then "nice --20 xlock" will raise the priority to -20 (which requires root privs anyway). If you're using csh, then it gets more confusing. In that case you are correct, the command will try to raise the priority (but confusingly, does not print an error if you don't have privileges) and the correct way to lower the priority is with "nice +20 command". I'm surprised this isn't in the UNIX Hater's Handbook, as it's a great examples of typical UNIX braindamage... :-) -- Jake
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