A maintenance shell was itself started with `nice -n 5 bash`, so its nice value is 5. Inside that shell you run `nice -n 3 ./convert.sh`. What nice value does convert.sh run with?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 103. GNU and Unix commands hard
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The options
Correct 8
Correct. The argument to -n is an increment added to the niceness the command inherits, and 5 + 3 is 8.
Not correct 3
Wrong. The value is not set absolutely; that is what renice does with an already running process.
Not correct 5
Wrong. The increment is applied, so the child does not simply keep the shell's value.
Not correct 0
Wrong. Nothing resets the niceness to the system default on exec; niceness is inherited across fork and exec.
Why
nice adjusts rather than assigns: the new niceness is the caller's niceness plus the increment, clamped to the range -20 to 19. renice, by contrast, sets an absolute value on processes that already exist. Because niceness is inherited by children, an increment applied to a shell silently applies to everything that shell subsequently starts, which is the effect being tested here.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page nice(1)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 103 and space the ones you get wrong.
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