"Nice" or not to "nice" large jobs

[25815-Richard CastoI895p130]

In article <3197 at sparko.gwu.edu>, sheryl at seas.gwu.edu (Sheryl Coppenger)
writes:
> 
> Historically (since before I worked here), there was a policy for
> users running large jobs which ran along these lines:
> 
> 	1)  Run them in the background
> 
> 	2)  Start them up with "nice" to lower priority

I am not sure if this is quite what you are looking for, but ksh
has a user-settable option to automatically "nice" background jobs
(set -o bgnice).