nice command?

Thomas Chadwick j_tetazoo@hotmail.com
Mon Jan 13 03:04:00 GMT 2003


I got to playing around with Windows 2000 Task Manager the other day and 
discovered that you can change the priority of a running task.  This led me 
to discover that you can specify the priority of a task when you launch it 
by way of the windows start command using one of the following options:

    LOW         Start application in the IDLE priority class
    NORMAL      Start application in the NORMAL priority class
    HIGH        Start application in the HIGH priority class
    REALTIME    Start application in the REALTIME priority class
    ABOVENORMAL Start application in the ABOVENORMAL priority class
    BELOWNORMAL Start application in the BELOWNORMAL priority class
    WAIT        Start application and wait for it to terminate

I then got to playing with nice (under Cygwin) to see what I could do about 
setting the priority of a Cygwin task.  I used the following syntax and 
tried a number of values of x:

    nice -n x programname.exe

I found that specify a value of x=0 results in NORMAL priority.  For any 
value of x > 0, I found I got a priority of LOW.  For any value of x < 0, I 
found I got a priority of HIGH.

I tried "man nice" and "info nice" and got scant documentation.  I'm just 
curious if this is the expected behavior of nice?  Is my analysis correct, 
or are there other values of "x" that will get me the other Windows 
priorities?  FWIW, there's a Cygwin task I'd like to launch with AboveNormal 
priority.


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