Discuss the nice command.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Linux always tries to distribute the available computing time equitably to all running processes. However, there may be times when you need to assign a process more or less computing time. You can do this with the nice command.
This command runs a program and assigns the corresponding process a specific nice value that affects the calculation of the process priority (which can be either increased or decreased). If you do not specify a nice value with this command, the process is started with a default value of +10.
The NI column in the top list contains the nice values assigned to the process. The default value 0 is regarded as neutral. You can assign the nice level using a numeric value of -20 to 19. The lower the value of the nice level, the higher the priority of the process. A process with a nice level of -20 runs at the highest priority; a process with a nice level of 19 runs at the lowest priority. The nice level is used by the scheduler to determine how frequently to service a running process.
Only root is permitted to start a process with a negative nice value (such as nice -n -3 xeyes). If a normal user attempts to do this, an error message is returned.