Programming Perl, 4th Edition

getpriority

getpriority WHICH, WHO

This function returns the current priority for a process, a process group, or a user. See getpriority(2). Invoking getpriority will raise an exception if used on a machine that doesn’t implement getpriority(2).

The BSD::Resource module from CPAN provides a more convenient interface, including the PRIO_PROCESS, PRIO_PGRP, and PRIO_USER symbolic constants to supply for the WHICH argument. Although these are traditionally set to 0, 1, and 2, respectively, you really never know what may happen within the dark confines of C’s #include files.

A value of 0 for WHO means the current process, process group, or user. So to get the priority of the current process, use:

$curprio = getpriority(0, 0);