NAME

nice − invoke a command with an altered scheduling priority

SYNOPSIS

/usr/bin/nice [ −increment | −n increment ] command [ argument ... ]

/usr/xpg4/bin/nice [ −increment | −n increment ] command [ argument ... ]

csh Builtin

nice [ −increment | +increment ] [ command ]

AVAILABILITY

/usr/bin/nice

SUNWcsu

/usr/xpg4/bin/nice

SUNWxcu4

DESCRIPTION

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. 

/usr/bin/nice

If nice executes commands with arguments, it uses the default shell /usr/bin/sh (see sh(1)). 

/usr/xpg4/bin/nice

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)). 

csh Builtin

nice is also a csh built-in command with behavior different from the command versions.  See csh(1) for description. 

OPTIONS

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. 

OPERANDS

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.

ENVIRONMENT

See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of nice: LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, PATH, and NLSPATH. 

EXIT STATUS

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. 

126 command was found but could not be invoked. 

127 command could not be found. 

SEE ALSO

csh(1), ksh(1), nohup(1), priocntl(1), sh(1), shell_builtins(1), nice(2), environ(5)

SunOS 5.5.1  —  Last change: 3 Nov 1995