8.6.26 nice command

Use nice (from the GNU shellutils package) to set a command's nice value when starting. renice (bsdutils) and top can renice a process. A nice value of 19 represents the slowest (lowest priority) process; negative values are "not-nice", with -20 being a very fast (high priority) process. Only the superuser can set negative nice values.

     # nice  -19 top                                         # very nice
     # nice --20 cdrecord -v -eject speed=2 dev=0,0 disk.img # very fast

Sometimes an extreme nice value does more harm than good to the system. Use this command carefully.