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NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | NOTES | BUGS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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getpriority(2) System Calls Manual getpriority(2)
getpriority, setpriority - get/set program scheduling priority
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#include <sys/resource.h>
int getpriority(int which, id_t who);
int setpriority(int which, id_t who, int prio);
The scheduling priority of the process, process group, or user, as
indicated by which and who is obtained with the getpriority() call
and set with the setpriority() call. The process attribute dealt
with by these system calls is the same attribute (also known as
the "nice" value) that is dealt with by nice(2).
The value which is one of PRIO_PROCESS, PRIO_PGRP, or PRIO_USER,
and who is interpreted relative to which (a process identifier for
PRIO_PROCESS, process group identifier for PRIO_PGRP, and a user
ID for PRIO_USER). A zero value for who denotes (respectively)
the calling process, the process group of the calling process, or
the real user ID of the calling process.
The prio argument is a value in the range -20 to 19 (but see NOTES
below), with -20 being the highest priority and 19 being the
lowest priority. Attempts to set a priority outside this range
are silently clamped to the range. The default priority is 0;
lower values give a process a higher scheduling priority.
The getpriority() call returns the highest priority (lowest
numerical value) enjoyed by any of the specified processes. The
setpriority() call sets the priorities of all of the specified
processes to the specified value.
Traditionally, only a privileged process could lower the nice
value (i.e., set a higher priority). However, since Linux 2.6.12,
an unprivileged process can decrease the nice value of a target
process that has a suitable RLIMIT_NICE soft limit; see
getrlimit(2) for details.
On success, getpriority() returns the calling thread's nice value,
which may be a negative number. On error, it returns -1 and sets
errno to indicate the error.
Since a successful call to getpriority() can legitimately return
the value -1, it is necessary to clear errno prior to the call,
then check errno afterward to determine if -1 is an error or a
legitimate value.
setpriority() returns 0 on success. On failure, it returns -1 and
sets errno to indicate the error.
EACCES The caller attempted to set a lower nice value (i.e., a
higher process priority), but did not have the required
privilege (on Linux: did not have the CAP_SYS_NICE
capability).
EINVAL which was not one of PRIO_PROCESS, PRIO_PGRP, or PRIO_USER.
EPERM A process was located, but its effective user ID did not
match either the effective or the real user ID of the
caller, and was not privileged (on Linux: did not have the
CAP_SYS_NICE capability). But see HISTORY below.
ESRCH No process was located using the which and who values
specified.
POSIX.1-2008.
POSIX.1-2001, SVr4, 4.4BSD (these interfaces first appeared in
4.2BSD).
The details on the condition for EPERM depend on the system. The
above description is what POSIX.1-2001 says, and seems to be
followed on all System V-like systems. Linux kernels before Linux
2.6.12 required the real or effective user ID of the caller to
match the real user of the process who (instead of its effective
user ID). Linux 2.6.12 and later require the effective user ID of
the caller to match the real or effective user ID of the process
who. All BSD-like systems (SunOS 4.1.3, Ultrix 4.2, 4.3BSD,
FreeBSD 4.3, OpenBSD-2.5, ...) behave in the same manner as Linux
2.6.12 and later.
For further details on the nice value, see sched(7).
Note: the addition of the "autogroup" feature in Linux 2.6.38
means that the nice value no longer has its traditional effect in
many circumstances. For details, see sched(7).
A child created by fork(2) inherits its parent's nice value. The
nice value is preserved across execve(2).
C library/kernel differences
The getpriority system call returns nice values translated to the
range 40..1, since a negative return value would be interpreted as
an error. The glibc wrapper function for getpriority() translates
the value back according to the formula unice = 20 - knice (thus,
the 40..1 range returned by the kernel corresponds to the range
-20..19 as seen by user space).
According to POSIX, the nice value is a per-process setting.
However, under the current Linux/NPTL implementation of POSIX
threads, the nice value is a per-thread attribute: different
threads in the same process can have different nice values.
Portable applications should avoid relying on the Linux behavior,
which may be made standards conformant in the future.
nice(1), renice(1), fork(2), capabilities(7), sched(7)
Documentation/scheduler/sched-nice-design.txt in the Linux kernel
source tree (since Linux 2.6.23)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.15.tar.gz
fetched from
⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-08-11. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 getpriority(2)
Pages that refer to this page: renice(1), getrlimit(2), ioprio_set(2), nice(2), sched_rr_get_interval(2), sched_setaffinity(2), sched_setattr(2), sched_setparam(2), sched_setscheduler(2), syscalls(2), errno(3), id_t(3type), proc_pid_stat(5), systemd.exec(5), capabilities(7), credentials(7), pid_namespaces(7), pthreads(7), sched(7)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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