What is special about a negative nice value?

• A. It increases priority
• B. It disables the scheduler
• C. It only applies to root-owned processes
• D. It requires sudo

Answer: (D)

A negative nice value means you’re asking the scheduler to treat the process with higher priority. Linux uses a niceness scale from -20 (highest priority) to 19 (lowest). Lowering niceness (giving it a negative value) increases the process’s CPU time share, i.e., raises its priority. That kind of change is privileged: regular users can only increase niceness (make it less favorable). To set a negative value, you typically need elevated privileges such as sudo or root. That’s why the statement about requiring sudo is the correct one.