RENICE(1) User Commands RENICE(1)NAME
renice - alter priority of running processes
SYNOPSIS
renice -n priority [options] <pid> [...]
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-n, --priority priority
The scheduling priority of the process, process group, or user.
Use of -n or --priority can only exist as the first argument of
renice command.
-g, --pgrp pgid
Force who parameters to be interpreted as process group ID's.
-u, --user name or uid
Force the who parameters to be interpreted as user name or id.
-p, --pid process id
Resets the who interpretation to be (the default) process ID's.
-v, --version
Print version.
-h, --help
Print help.
EXAMPLES
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.
NOTES
Users other than the super-user may only alter the priority of pro‐
cesses 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 priori‐
ties 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
processes, 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)