nice is a program found on Unix and Unix-like operating systems such as Linux.
Only the superuser (root) may set the niceness to a lower value (i.e. a higher priority).
On Linux it is possible to change /etc/security/limits.conf to allow other users or groups to set low nice values.
[4] If a user wanted to compress a large file without slowing down other processes, they might run the following: The exact mathematical effect of setting a particular niceness value for a process depends on the details of how the scheduler is designed on that implementation of Unix.
[citation needed] The related renice program can be used to change the priority of a process that is already running.