22.3 nice: Run a command with modified scheduling priority

nice prints or modifies the scheduling priority of a job. Synopsis:

nice [option]... [command [arg]...]

If no arguments are given, nice prints the current scheduling priority, which it inherited. Otherwise, nice runs the given command with its scheduling priority adjusted. If no adjustment is given, the priority of the command is incremented by 10. You must have appropriate privileges to specify a negative adjustment. The priority can be adjusted by nice over the range of -20 (the highest priority) to 19 (the lowest).

Because most shells have a built-in command by the same name, using the unadorned command name in a script or interactively may get you different functionality than that described here.

The program accepts the following option. Also see 2. Common options.

`-n adjustment'

`--adjustment=adjustment'

Add adjustment instead of 10 to the command's priority.

On older systems, nice supports an obsolete option `-adjustment'. POSIX 1003.1-2001 (see section 2.5 Standards conformance) does not allow this; use `-n adjustment' instead.