RENICE(1) User Commands RENICE(1)NAME
renice - alter priority of running processes
SYNOPSIS
renice [-n] priority [-gpu] identifier...
DESCRIPTION
renice alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes.
The first argument is the priority value to be used. The other argu‐
ments are interpreted as process IDs (by default), process group IDs,
user IDs, 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.
OPTIONS-n, --priority priority
Specify the scheduling priority to be used for the process,
process group, or user. Use of the option -n or --priority is
optional, but when used it must be the first argument.
-g, --pgrp pgid...
Force the succeeding arguments to be interpreted as process
group IDs.
-u, --user name_or_uid...
Force the succeeding arguments to be interpreted as usernames or
UIDs.
-p, --pid pid...
Force the succeeding arguments to be interpreted as process IDs
(the default).
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
-V, --version
Display version information and exit.
EXAMPLES
The following command would change the priority of the processes with
PIDs 987 and 32, plus all processes owned by the users daemon and root:
renice +1 987 -u daemon root -p 32
NOTES
Users other than the superuser 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 superuser 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 IDs
SEE ALSOgetpriority(2), setpriority(2)BUGS
Non-superusers cannot 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 sys‐
temcall 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 Linux Kernel Archive ⟨ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-
linux/⟩.
util-linux September 2011 RENICE(1)