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Systems & Data Center · Intermediate

Nice Value

A Linux process scheduling priority from -20 (highest priority) to 19 (lowest) that influences CPU time allocation.

Definition

nice starts a process with a given value and renice changes it for a running process. Regular users can only increase niceness (lower priority); only root can assign negative values.

Example

nice -n 10 tar czf backup.tgz /data runs a backup at reduced CPU priority.

Exam tip

Lower nice number means higher priority; only root can set negative values.

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