nice (Unix)

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.