[H-GEN] Priorities

[Andrae Muys]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
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Robert Stanford wrote:
> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
> 
> What is the logic behind negative nice values having higher priorities
> than positive ones? At first glance it seems a bit backwards, but I'm 
> sure there must be a good (and unknown to me) reason for it.
> 
> In fact how come they range from -20 to +19, why not 0-39 ?

'cause 0 is a nice place to put the break between privilaged and 
unprivilaged nice levels.  ie. you have to be root to set processes to 
-ve nice levels.

And the logic behind the ordering, it's "nice", not "privilage", higher 
nice levels indicate the process is 'nicer'.

Andrae

-- 
Andrae Muys                       But can it generate *quantum* Haiku
<andrae.muys at braintree.com.au>    error messages, in Latin, where each
Engineer                          line of the error message is a
Braintree Communications          palindrome? -- Mike Vanier on perl



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