Difference between nice and setpriority in unix

c linux unix system-calls nice
Aswin Parthasarathy picture Aswin Parthasarathy · Oct 1, 2011 · Viewed 8.4k times · Source

I'm trying to implement a different flavor of the 'nice' command of unix in C. I have seen the definitions of nice() system call and setpriority() call. The nice() call only increments/decrements the priority of the process. If I want to set the priority of a process to a particular value, can't I use the nice() call? Basically, other than how the priority is modified, is there any difference between nice() and setpriority() ?

Answer

Foo Bah picture Foo Bah · Oct 1, 2011

It's historical. nice() was introduced long before setpriority(). For backwards compatibility, the nice function was retained.

Related questions

How do I get a thread ID from an arbitrary pthread_t?

I have a pthread_t, and I'd like to change its CPU affinity. The problem is that I'm using glibc 2.3.2, which doesn't have pthread_setaffinity_np(). That's OK, though, because pthread_setaffinity_np() is itself a wrapper of sched_setaffinity(), …

Read More
O_APPEND flag and lseek

Write a program that opens an existing file for writing with the O_APPEND flag, and then seeks to the beginning of the file before writing some data. Where does the data appear in the file? Why? this is my …

Read More
Why does ENOENT mean "No such file or directory"?

What does the ENT mean in ENOENT? Shouldn't the error: No such file or directory just be named by ENOFILE? Is there any story or reason?

Read More