nice.1, renice.1 and nice.info : claims non-root user cannot decrease niceness

[John McCabe-Dansted]

Binary package hint: manpages

According to "man nice" and "info coreutils nice", it is not possible for a non-root user to decrease the niceness of a process (even if they were the ones that increased the niceness). However this not the case in Ubuntu 9.04, as evidenced by the fact that the attached script "stopfirefox" can reduce the niceness back to 0 when firefox is unminimized. The manpage and infopage should be modified in light of this, and should also say where this was configured. According to
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_%28Unix%29#cite_note-0
This can be configured in /etc/security/limits.conf, however this does not seem to have any uncommented lines, so presumably Ubuntu configured this somewhere else.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Dependencies:

DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: manpages 3.15-1
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
SourcePackage: manpages
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-14-generic x86_64

[Stéphane Aulery (lkppo)]

nice.1 manpage come from coreutils package.

[Stéphane Aulery (lkppo)]

Have you read renice.1 that have more information ? I think that add a reference to talking about /etc/security/limits.conf is a good idea.

[Stéphane Aulery (lkppo)]

Upstream bug report: http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20111