Using the 'nice' command to control a proceses CPU utilization

The nice command can be used to control the CPU utilization of a specific process.

There are varying levels ranging from -20 (which favours the process's CPU utilization) and 19 which assigns a process the least favouritable for CPU utilization.

For example you might want to ensure a large report does not consume all of the available CPU - so you could issue something like:

nice -n 19 /bin/bash /path/to/report.sh

or if we wanted to ensure that the process had priority over others:

nice -n -20 /bin/bash /path/to/report.sh