Great, just minor issues - tourette

I think the author was just keeping inline with Unix process pritority numbering. The lower the number the highest priority sort like being 1st in line.

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Tuesday, June 28 2005 @ 03:40 PM PDT

Great, just minor issues - rcfa

Exactly.
The utility is a front end (or equivalent) for the nice/renice commands as well as a means to send a program a SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signal, which you could also do with
kill -STOP <pid>
respectively
kill -CONT <pid>

Negative priorities require root privilege, and that for good reason, because you can mess things up if a process has a higher priority than some cooperating process that is responsible for IO. You can potentially deadlock a process that way.

Since processes are assigned CPU time in a priority queue, low number means high priority, exactly as in a queue: if you're first, you have top priority. The negative numbers are only an extension of the concept, because if you go below 1 you end up in negative territory. That is also a much better way of making obvious what is normally reserved for system purposes (positive user, negative system) than if you had to remember 40-20 is user and 0-19 is system...

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Thursday, July 07 2005 @ 03:58 AM PDT