[ Thanks to Kevin
Reichard for this link. ]
“Job control and scheduling is quickly becoming less and less of
an issue for most Linux users and administrators. Virtually all
scheduling is done (justifiably so) via cron. However, I have come
across many occasions as of late where using job control and
processing techniques is quite handy. This article will look at
two aspects of job control: first, priority scheduling and altering
priorities with nice and renice, respectively; second, batch
processing and scheduling using batch, at, and cron,
respectively.“
“Many UNIX users are very familiar with nice and renice, and as
they pertain to job control they deserve mention within this
context. The nice command is used to alter an initial job priority.
On Linux systems this is fairly simple: the lower the nice command
the higher the priority. The range on a Linux system is -20 (being
the highest) to 19 (the lowest). Using nice is pretty simple. Let’s
say we want to make sure that a compile and install for fetchmail
has a pretty high priority. We might do the following: nice -n
5 make“
“We have lowered the nice number and raised the job priority
initially for this task.”