Nice (Unix)
standard UNIX utility
nice is a program found on Unix and Unix-like operating systems such as Linux. It directly maps to a kernel call of the same name. nice is used to invoke a utility or shell script with a particular CPU priority, thus giving the process more or less CPU time than other processes. A niceness of −20 is the lowest niceness, or highest priority. The default niceness for processes is inherited from its parent process and is usually 0.
Systems have diverged on what priority is the lowest. Linux systems document a niceness of 19 as the lowest priority, BSD systems document 20 as the lowest priority. In both cases, the "lowest" priority is documented as running only when nothing else wants to.
Etymology
Niceness value is a number attached to processes in *nix systems, that is used along with other data (such as the amount of I/O done by each process) by the kernel process scheduler to calculate a process's 'true priority'—which is used to decide how much CPU time is allocated to it.
The program's name, nice, is an allusion to its task of modifying a process's niceness value.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nice (Unix)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.