Nice

nice allows you to change the priority of a utility that is not running. You must give the -n flag, like so:

samizdata# nice -n 20 nmap -sS -sU -O localhost

Using the -n flag allows you to set the priority that the process will run at, using a numeric value from -20 to +20; the lower the number, the higher the priority.

Note that this is not for already running processes, for that, see renice.

See also renice