automatic renice in 4.1 bsd?

[ron at wjvax.UUCP]

From: dce at hammer.UUCP (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.bugs.4bsd
Subject: Re: automatic renice in 4.1 bsd?


Another problem (besides the kernel renicing processes) is the csh
builtin command `nice'. If you look at the documentation, you will
see that `nice' with no arguments claims to set the nice of the current
shell to 4.

The code that attempts to do this does a nice(20), a nice(-10), and a
nice(4) (supposedly, this changes the nice to the maximum, back to 0,
and then to 4), but if you aren't the superuser, this sets the nice
to 19 and that's all. (Does anyone know why this would have worked
at some time?)

****

Well, when we were running U*IX on our 11/23, normal mortals COULD
nice to minus numbers.  In fact, when you had the machine to yourself
you could do a nice --40 and watch your program whizz right along.
Under these circumstances the csh would have no problem setting
a priority of 4.

Perhaps this "feature" of 4.1 is left over from the old 11/23 days?
-- 

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