nice: Badly formed number

[Freddie Cash]

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 1:16 PM, william opensource4you <william.os4y at gmail.com> wrote:
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 at 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.nice is both a binary (/usr/bin/nice) and a shell built-in function.  Depending on the shell you are using, you will either be using the built-in or the binary.  And the syntax for them is very different.
I believe you are using the csh above, thus using the built-in nice, which does not support -n. 

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 2011Here you are giving the full path to the nice binary, so you are always using that binary.Try the above using /usr/bin/nice for each test, and you'll get the same results.
Read the man page for your shell to see if nice is a built-in function or not.-- Freddie Cashfjwcash at gmail.com