39.10 A nice Gotcha

NOTE: It's NOT a good idea to nice a foreground job (12.1 ) . If the system gets busy, your terminal could "freeze" waiting to get enough CPU time to do something. You may not even be able to kill (38.9 ) a nice 'd job on a very busy system because the CPU may never give the process enough CPU time to recognize the signal waiting for it! And, of course, don't nice an interactive program like a text editor unless you like to wait... :-)