AND.PRIORITIES(5) File Formats AND.PRIORITIES(5)NAME
/etc/and.priorities - priority database for the auto nice daemon.
VERSION
This manual page documents and.priorities for and version 1.0.7.
DESCRIPTION
This is the priority database file for and. It stores (user, group,
command, nicelevels) tuples (hereafter called entries) to determine the
new nice level (or the kill signal, for that matter) when a job reaches
one of the time limits defined in /etc/and.conf. (See lv1time,
lv2time, and lv3time on the and.conf manual page for details.) See the
affinity setting in /etc/and.conf for how ambiguities between the
fields (user, group, command) are dealt with when searching the data‐
base to determine the new nice level for a job.
Comments start with a # in the first column. Empty lines are ignored.
Unlike with other configuration files, lines cannot be concatenated
with a backslash. Furthermore, this file is case sensitive.
and allows for host-specific sections in the configuration file. These
work as lines of the form on somehost and work as follows: the parser
determines if the host name (as returned by gethostname) matches the
extended regular expression that follows the on keyword. If it does, it
just keeps processing the file as if nothing had happened. If it does
not match, however, everything up to the next on keyword is skipped. So
if you want to end a host-specific section, you must write on .*
(which matches all hosts) to switch back to normal.
Don't forget to kill -HUP the auto nice daemon to enable the changes.
SETTINGS
A valid entry consists of a line of six columns, separated by one or
more spaces. These columns are: (in that order)
user The user ID the command is running under. May be a user name
(which will be looked up in the password file and, if enabled, via
NIS), or a numeric user ID, or an asterisk for any user.
group
The group ID the command is running under. May be a group name
(which will be looked up in the group file and again, if enabled,
via NIS), or a numeric group ID, or an asterisk for any group.
command
The name of the command, without path. May be a command, a regular
expression to match multiple commands, or an asterisk for any com‐
mand. Note that "foobar" will not match "/usr/bin/foobar" - you
probably mean ".*foobar" or even ".*foobar.*".
nicelevel 1
The nice level after lv1time CPU time was used by the command.
Positive numbers and 0 are interpreted as nice levels; negative
numbers are interpreted as signals to be sent to the command. A
"nice level" of 19 will almost stop the job, -9 will actually kill
it. (Like in kill -9.) lv1time can be set in /etc/and.conf
nicelevel 2
Same but after lv2time.
nicelevel 3
Same but after lv3time.
EXAMPLES
Here are some entries from the real world (i.e. from "my" cluster at
the Institute). As lv[123]time, 5 min., 20 min., and 1 hour is assumed.
(Which is the default. See /etc/and.conf for details.) You might also
check the default priority database that comes with and.
# A finer default nice level
* * * 4 8 12
# User dau is an idiot, so treat him like accordingly
dau * * 19 19 19
# Netscape sometimes goes berserk, we must stop it
* * netscape 4 -9 -9
# Most hosts are free for everyone but some are
# especially for the FOO group
* * * 4 8 12
on (bar|baz)
* * * 8 12 16
# ... or, more radical: * * * -9 -9 -9
* foo * 4 8 12
on .*
# KDE screen savers...
* * .*kss 16 16 16
FILES
/etc/and.priorities
The priority database (in plain text). Contains the (user, group,
command, nicelevels) tuples. This is what this manual page is
about.
SEE ALSOand(8), and.conf(5), kill(1), regex(7), renice(8)INTERNET
http://and.sourceforge.net/
AUTHOR
The auto nice daemon and this manual page were written by Patrick
Schemitz <schemitz@users.sourceforge.net>
Unix 27 Jan 2002 AND.PRIORITIES(5)