Assign priorities to processes

You can change the priority of a process...

in this way you can assign more CPU time to programs that are used more and less time on others.

The command to use is as follows:

nice -n[priority level] [program]

the possible values for the priorities are from -20 to 19, -20 is the highest priority while 19 is the lowest.

To change the priority of a program already running, you can use the program renice as follows:

renice [new level priority] [pid]

Nota: only the root user is able to run programs with negative priority.