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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Weird syscall returns
Message-ID: <23297@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 13-Jul-87 14:05:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.23297
Posted: Mon Jul 13 14:05:14 1987
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> >>     I can think of no Unix system call that doesn't return -1 on error.
> >
> >What about nice()?
> 
> Well I don't know about your system, but on ours (ISI 68K - BSD 4.3)
> there ain't no entry for nice in sect. 2 of the manual - it's in section 3.
> What this tells me is that nice(3) isn't a direct system call. In fact it
> goes via [sg]etpriority(2) which IS a system type call...

Yes, but that's only the case on systems that have derived their
"nice" and "[sg]etpriority" implementations from the 4.[23]BSD one.
On other UNIX systems, "nice" *is* a system call, and it *does*
return -1 on error.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com