nice(1) [freebsd man page]
NICE(1) BSD General Commands Manual NICE(1) NAME
nice -- execute a utility at an altered scheduling priority SYNOPSIS
nice [-n increment] utility [argument ...] DESCRIPTION
The nice utility runs utility at an altered scheduling priority, by incrementing its ``nice'' value by the specified increment, or a default value of 10. The lower the nice value of a process, the higher its scheduling priority. The superuser may specify a negative increment in order to run a utility with a higher scheduling priority. Some shells may provide a builtin nice command which is similar or identical to this utility. Consult the builtin(1) manual page. ENVIRONMENT
The PATH environment variable is used to locate the requested utility if the name contains no '/' characters. EXIT STATUS
If utility is invoked, the exit status of nice is the exit status of utility. An exit status of 126 indicates utility was found, but could not be executed. An exit status of 127 indicates utility could not be found. EXAMPLES
Execute utility 'date' at priority 5 assuming the priority of the shell is 0: nice -n 5 date Execute utility 'date' at priority -19 assuming the priority of the shell is 0 and you are the super-user: nice -n 16 nice -n -35 date COMPATIBILITY
The traditional -increment option has been deprecated but is still supported. SEE ALSO
builtin(1), csh(1), idprio(1), rtprio(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2), renice(8) STANDARDS
The nice utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1''). HISTORY
A nice utility appeared in Version 4 AT&T UNIX. BSD
February 24, 2011 BSD
Check Out this Related Man Page
nice(1) User Commands nice(1) NAME
nice - invoke a command with an altered scheduling priority SYNOPSIS
/usr/bin/nice [-increment | -n increment] command [argument]... /usr/xpg4/bin/nice [-increment | -n increment] command [argument]... csh Builtin nice [-increment | +increment] [command] DESCRIPTION
The nice utility invokes command, requesting that it be run with a different system scheduling priority. The priocntl(1) command is a more general interface to scheduler functions. The invoking process (generally the user's shell) must be in a scheduling class that supports nice. If the C shell (see csh(1)) is used, the full path of the command must be specified. Otherwise, the csh built-in version of nice will be invoked. See csh Builtin below. /usr/bin/nice If nice executes commands with arguments, it uses the default shell /usr/bin/sh (see sh(1)). /usr/xpg4/bin/nice If nice executes commands with arguments, it uses /usr/xpg4/bin/sh (see ksh(1)). csh Builtin nice is also a csh built-in command with behavior different from the utility versions. See csh(1) for description. OPTIONS
The following options are supported: -increment | -n increment increment is a positive or negative decimal integer that has the same effect on the execution of the utility as if the utility had called the nice() function with the numeric value of the increment option-argument. See nice(2). nice() errors, other than EINVAL, are ignored. If not specified, an increment of 10 is assumed. The super-user may run commands with priority higher than normal by using a negative increment such as -10. A negative increment assigned by an unprivileged user is ignored. OPERANDS
The following operands are supported: command The name of a command that is to be invoked. If command names any of the special built-in utilities (see shell_builtins(1)), the results are undefined. argument Any string to be supplied as an argument when invoking command. ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of nice: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MES- SAGES, PATH, and NLSPATH. EXIT STATUS
If command is invoked, the exit status of nice will be the exit status of command. Otherwise, nice will exit with one of the following val- ues: 1-125 An error occurred. 126 command was found but could not be invoked. 127 command could not be found. ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: /usr/bin/nice +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWcsu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |CSI |Enabled | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ /usr/xpg4/bin/nice +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWxcu4 | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |CSI |Enabled | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Interface Stability |Standard | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
csh(1), ksh(1), nohup(1), priocntl(1), sh(1), shell_builtins(1), nice(2), attributes(5), environ(5), standards(5) SunOS 5.11 23 Jan 2004 nice(1)