IDL and 'nice' question

[Randall Skelton <rhskelto(at)atm.ox.ac.uk>]

Hi all,

I have a question regarding setting the priority of IDL on a *nix
operating system.  There are certain instances when it is desirable to
set the priority of idl to a lower priority with the nice command.  Of
course, typing 'idl' at the command-line is actually a front-end to a shell
script and not an actual binary.  Are there any foreseeable problems in
starting the idl binary directly with 'nice -19 $IDL_DIR/bin/idl' as
opposed to staring the shell script?

One *nix quirk here is that a general user cannot increase the priority of
idl once it has been niced to a low priority.

--excerpt from renice man page--
BUGS: Non super-users can not increase scheduling priorities of their own 
processes, even if they were the ones that decreased the priorities
in the first place. 

The Linux kernel (at least version 2.0.0) and linux libc (at least
version 5.2.18) does not agree entirely on what the specifics of the
system call interface to set nice values is.  Thus causes renice to report
bogus previous nice values.
--

This is probably not the best place to ask, but does anyone know if
writing a dlm using getpriority() and setpriority() could overcome this?

Cheers,
Randall