How does the windows specific aspects of nice work?

[Jason House <jhouse at mitre dot org>]

I did a search online and found the following message (but no reply to 
it).  Does anyone know the particulars about nice?  If it still works as 
they describe (with 2 non-normal priorities), does anyone know when it 
will allow the full range of window supported priorities?


    * From: "Thomas Chadwick" <j_tetazoo at hotmail dot com>
    * To: cygwin at cygwin dot com
    * Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2003 14:44:37 -0500
    * Subject: nice command?
    * Bcc:

I got to playing around with Windows 2000 Task Manager the other day and 
discovered that you can change the priority of a running task. This led 
me to discover that you can specify the priority of a task when you 
launch it by way of the windows start command using one of the following 
options:

LOW Start application in the IDLE priority class
NORMAL Start application in the NORMAL priority class
HIGH Start application in the HIGH priority class
REALTIME Start application in the REALTIME priority class
ABOVENORMAL Start application in the ABOVENORMAL priority class
BELOWNORMAL Start application in the BELOWNORMAL priority class
WAIT Start application and wait for it to terminate

I then got to playing with nice (under Cygwin) to see what I could do 
about setting the priority of a Cygwin task. I used the following syntax 
and tried a number of values of x:

nice -n x programname.exe

I found that specify a value of x=0 results in NORMAL priority. For any 
value of x > 0, I found I got a priority of LOW. For any value of x < 0, 
I found I got a priority of HIGH.

I tried "man nice" and "info nice" and got scant documentation. I'm just 
curious if this is the expected behavior of nice? Is my analysis 
correct, or are there other values of "x" that will get me the other 
Windows priorities? FWIW, there's a Cygwin task I'd like to launch with 
AboveNormal priority.



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