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NICE(1) General Commands Manual NICE(1)

NAME

nice - Run COMMAND with an adjusted niceness, which affects process scheduling. With no COMMAND, print the current niceness. Niceness values range from -20 (most favorable to the process) to 19 (least favorable to the process).

SYNOPSIS

nice [-n|--adjustment] [-h|--help] [-V|--version] [COMMAND]

DESCRIPTION

Run COMMAND with an adjusted niceness, which affects process scheduling. With no COMMAND, print the current niceness. Niceness values range from -20 (most favorable to the process) to 19 (least favorable to the process).

OPTIONS

add N to the niceness (default is 10)
Print help
Print version
[COMMAND]

VERSION

v(uutils coreutils) 0.8.0

EXAMPLES

Print the current niceness value:

nice

Increment the current niceness value by 10:

nice nice

Launch a program with lowered priority:

nice -niceness_value command

Launch a program with heightened priority:

sudo nice --niceness_value command

Define the priority with an explicit option:

nice [-n|--adjustment] niceness_value command

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.

2026-05-17