insane -19 nice level for system service (mailgraph) - is it acceptable?

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> said:
> On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 10:57:21 -0600,
>   Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> > Once upon a time, Michał Piotrowski <mkkp4x4 at gmail.com> said:
> > > 
> > > PRIORITY=-19
> 
> > Why do you (repeatedly) call it "insane"?  That's kind of rude.  The
> > process is running at a low priority level; do you have a problem with
> > that?
> 
> Aren't negative priorities higher? I think this is running at the max
> priority, not the min one.

Negative priorities are higher, but that's not what is being set.  For
historical compatibilty, "nice" takes a numeric option as a nice value,
so "nice -n X" is the same as "nice -X" (it appears this behavior is not
documented).  You can verify this:

$ nice -n 19 ps -o nice,cmd
 NI CMD
 19 ps -o nice,cmd
$ nice -19 ps -o nice,cmd
 NI CMD
 19 ps -o nice,cmd

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.