nice(1) manual page
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nice - invoke a command with an altered scheduling priority
/usr/bin/nice
[ -increment | -n increment ] command [ argument ... ]
/usr/xpg4/bin/nice [
-increment | -n increment ] command [ argument ... ]
nice [ -increment
| +increment ] [ command ]
SUNWcsu
SUNWxcu4
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.
If nice executes commands with arguments, it uses the
default shell /usr/bin/sh (see sh(1)
).
If nice executes
commands with arguments, it uses the XPG4-complaint shell /usr/xpg4/bin/sh,
which is equivalent to /usr/bin/ksh (see ksh(1)
).
nice is also
a csh built-in command with behavior different from the command versions.
See csh(1)
for description.
The following options are supported:
- -increment | -n increment
- increment must be in the range 1-19; if not specified,
an increment of 10 is assumed. An increment greater than 19 is equivalent
to 19.
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.
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.
See environ(5)
for descriptions of the
following environment variables that affect the execution of nice: LC_CTYPE
,
LC_MESSAGES
, PATH
, and NLSPATH
.
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 values:
- 1-125
- An error occurred. nice utility.
- command was found but could not be invoked.
- command could not be found.
csh(1)
, ksh(1)
, nohup(1)
, priocntl(1)
, sh(1)
, shell_builtins(1)
, nice(2)
,
environ(5)
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