RENICE(1) BSD General Commands Manual RENICE(1)NAMErenice — alter priority of running processes
SYNOPSISrenice [-n] priority [[-p] pid ...] [[-g] pgrp ...] [[-u] user ...]
renice-h | -v
DESCRIPTION
Renice alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes.
The following who parameters are interpreted as process ID's, process
group ID's, or user names. Renice'ing a process group causes all pro‐
cesses in the process group to have their scheduling priority altered.
Renice'ing a user causes all processes owned by the user to have their
scheduling priority altered. By default, the processes to be affected
are specified by their process ID's.
Options supported by renice:
-n, --priority
The scheduling priority of the process, process group, or user.
-g, --pgrp
Force who parameters to be interpreted as process group ID's.
-u, --user
Force the who parameters to be interpreted as user names.
-p, --pid
Resets the who interpretation to be (the default) process ID's.
-v, --version
Print version.
-h, --help
Print help.
For example,
renice +1 987 -u daemon root -p 32
would change the priority of process ID's 987 and 32, and all processes
owned by users daemon and root.
Users other than the super-user may only alter the priority of processes
they own, and can only monotonically increase their ``nice value'' (for
security reasons) within the range 0 to PRIO_MAX (20), unless a nice
resource limit is set (Linux 2.6.12 and higher). The super-user may
alter the priority of any process and set the priority to any value in
the range PRIO_MIN (-20) to PRIO_MAX. Useful priorities are: 20 (the
affected processes will run only when nothing else in the system wants
to), 0 (the ``base'' scheduling priority), anything negative (to make
things go very fast).
FILES
/etc/passwd to map user names to user ID's
SEE ALSOgetpriority(2), setpriority(2)BUGS
Non super-users can not increase scheduling priorities of their own pro‐
cesses, even if they were the ones that decreased the priorities in the
first place.
The Linux kernel (at least version 2.0.0) and linux libc (at least ver‐
sion 5.2.18) does not agree entirely on what the specifics of the system‐
call interface to set nice values is. Thus causes renice to report bogus
previous nice values.
HISTORY
The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD.
AVAILABILITY
The renice command is part of the util-linux package and is available
from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
4th Berkeley Distribution June 9, 1993 4th Berkeley Distribution