Re: nice: Badly formed number

["Sascha Wildner" <saw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:16:08 +0100, william opensource4you  
<william.os4y@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>
> Am I the only one having troubles with the command nice ?
> I'm running: DragonFly mydfbsd 2.10-RELEASE DragonFly
> v2.10.1.1.gf7ba0-RELEASE #1: Mon Apr 25 19:51:42 UTC 2011
> root@pkgbox32.dragonflybsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC_SMP  i386
>
>
> Here the results (the last example is coming from the man page):
> mydfbsd# nice -5 date
> Tue Dec  6 22:11:19 CET 2011
> mydfbsd# nice -n5 date
> nice: Badly formed number.
> mydfbsd# nice -n 5 date
> nice: Badly formed number.
>
> If I take the source code on the gitweb:
> http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob/HEAD:/usr.bin/nice/nice.c
> I compile it by doing "gcc nice.c"
>
> here the results:
>
> mydfbsd# ./a.out -5 date
> Tue Dec  6 22:11:08 CET 2011
> mydfbsd# ./a.out -n5 date
> Tue Dec  6 22:11:11 CET 2011
> mydfbsd# ./a.out -n 5 date
> Tue Dec  6 22:11:14 CET 2011
>
> Why 2 different results ?
> It does not sounds that nice has been updated since them ...

Nice is a builtin in csh(1) (which I guess you are using in the first  
example) and has a different syntax there (see documentation in csh(1)  
manpage for 'nice'). In the second example you use the non-builtin (which  
also sh(1) will use).

Sascha