In which condition "nice" command's return value will be 33?

Question

"nice" command is returning value as 33. Please help me understand why nice is returning the value as 33. In some systems it works just fine giving return value as 0 but on a system it gives me return value as 33.

    nice -n -10 <doing some process here> 
    returnValue=$?

Here returnValue gets a value as 33 in spite of 0.

Which shell are you using? Perhaps `nice` is a builtin command of your shell. Or try `/usr/bin/nice`; or perhaps the niced command is returning 33 — Basile Starynkevitch, Nov 13 '16 at 14:08

Basile Starynkevitch · Accepted Answer · 2016-11-13T14:40:45.967

It looks like nice(1) is returning the exit code of the niced command^*. Try

nice bash -c 'exit 13' ; echo $?

and you get 13. So your niced command got an exit code of 33. We can't tell you how does that happen, because you don't tell what command are you nicing. BTW, some shells might have a nice builtin so you might use explicitly /usr/bin/nice instead of nice

Note *: even when nice fails (e.g. nice -n -12 id without being root), it says something to stderr but exit 0

In which condition "nice" command's return value will be 33?

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