NICE(1)

📦
version 9.12 · 26 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 NICE(1) 💖

okay bestie, so this is the nice page from the User Commands manual — yes, the name is literally lowercase nice, we love a humble icon 💅

✨ NAME ✨

nice — run a program with modified scheduling priority 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

nice [OPTION] [COMMAND [ARG]...]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So the whole vibe here is: you run a COMMAND, but with an adjusted niceness, which is what decides how the scheduler treats your process. Think of niceness as the politeness level of your little program. 🥺

And if you give it no COMMAND at all? It just prints the current niceness. Cute, right? Like a lil vibe check for your process.

Niceness values go from -20 (most favorable to the process, aka main character energy 👑) all the way to 19 (least favorable to the process, aka please go last, no rush 🐌).

Also, super important, bestie: mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too. No exceptions, no cap.

  • -n, --adjustment=N — add integer N to the niceness (default 10) ✨
  • --help — display this help and exit 🫶
  • --version — output version information and exit 💜
Heads up though: your shell may have its own version of nice, and it usually supersedes the version described here. Please refer to your shell's documentation for details about the options it supports. ikyky 😭

🍓 Exit status: 🍓

  • 125 — if the nice command itself fails 💀
  • 126 — if COMMAND is found but cannot be invoked 🙈
  • 127 — if COMMAND cannot be found 😭
  • - — the exit status of COMMAND otherwise 🌈

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Written by David MacKenzie. thank you for your service, king 🫡

💌 REPORTING BUGS 💌

Report bugs to: <bug-coreutils@gnu.org>.

Report any translation bugs to: <https://translationproject.org/team/>.

GNU coreutils home page: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>

General help using GNU software: <https://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>

Copyright © 2026 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.

There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/nice>

or available locally via: info '(coreutils) nice invocation'

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 💖 this beauty is GNU coreutils 9.12, dated September 2026 — go forth and be nice (or don't, -n -20 is right there) 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from