On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 1:16 PM Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) <mtk.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi Dan, > > On 6/11/20 7:13 AM, Dan Kenigsberg wrote: > > Anyone can raise the niceness value. Only lowering requires CAP_SYS_NICE. > > > > $ nice -n +2 nice > > 2 > > $ nice -n -2 nice > > nice: cannot set niceness: Permission denied > > 0 > > $ sudo nice -n -2 nice > > -2 > > > > Signed-off-by: Dan Kenigsberg <danken@xxxxxxxxxx> > > As I'm sure you're aware, the meaning of the nice value > is always a source of confusion! In writing the original text, > my intent was that the reader would understand that [higher nice > value] == [more negative nice value], but obviously that that > could be ambiguous. Indeed, I'm aware of the old confusion. Some of it stems from people thinking about this value as a priority. However, it was named "niceness" because higher value means lesser cpu time. I think that the man page language should stick to the code and command line arguments (`nice -n +2` makes the value higher and the process less likely to run) > > > --- > > man7/capabilities.7 | 2 +- > > 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) > > > > diff --git a/man7/capabilities.7 b/man7/capabilities.7 > > index 6254c0ac0..64a9f8e34 100644 > > --- a/man7/capabilities.7 > > +++ b/man7/capabilities.7 > > @@ -527,7 +527,7 @@ drop capabilities from the system-wide capability > > bounding set. > > .PD 0 > > .RS > > .IP * 2 > > -Raise process nice value > > +Lower process nice value > > .RB ( nice (2), > > .BR setpriority (2)) > > and change the nice value for arbitrary processes; > > I instead applied a differnt patch, as below. > I hope it works for you. > > Cheers, > > Michael > > diff --git a/man7/capabilities.7 b/man7/capabilities.7 > index 8f212bead..bf9949ad2 100644 > --- a/man7/capabilities.7 > +++ b/man7/capabilities.7 > @@ -556,7 +556,7 @@ drop capabilities from the system-wide capability bounding set. > .PD 0 > .RS > .IP * 2 > -Raise process nice value > +Give process a higher (i.e., more negative) nice value To me, this suggestion adds to the confusion. Higher numbers are typically considered "less negative", not more. How about saying: Lower process nice value (i.e. make it less nice to other processes) > .RB ( nice (2), > .BR setpriority (2)) > and change the nice value for arbitrary processes; > > > > -- > Michael Kerrisk > Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ > Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/ >
