The priority of a process is known as its nice value (or niceness). It tells you how much nice (number of CPU cycles used) a process is on CPU. Its value varies from -20 to 19. A lower nice value represents a higherpriority process, which will take more CPU cycles, while a higher nice value represents a lowpriority process that can wait longer and consumes less CPU cycles. So, a nice value of -20 represents the highest priority and a nice value of 19 represents the lowest priority. The default value for new processes is generally 0, which is inherited from their parent.