1RENICE(1)                 BSD General Commands Manual                RENICE(1)
2

NAME

4     renice — alter priority of running processes
5

SYNOPSIS

7     renice [-n] priority [[-p] pid ...] [[-g] pgrp ...] [[-u] user ...]
8     renice -h | -v
9

DESCRIPTION

11     Renice alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes.
12     The following who parameters are interpreted as process ID's, process
13     group ID's, or user names.  Renice'ing a process group causes all pro‐
14     cesses in the process group to have their scheduling priority altered.
15     Renice'ing a user causes all processes owned by the user to have their
16     scheduling priority altered.  By default, the processes to be affected
17     are specified by their process ID's.
18
19     Options supported by renice:
20
21     -n, --priority
22             The scheduling priority of the process, process group, or user.
23
24     -g, --pgrp
25             Force who parameters to be interpreted as process group ID's.
26
27     -u, --user
28             Force the who parameters to be interpreted as user names.
29
30     -p, --pid
31             Resets the who interpretation to be (the default) process ID's.
32
33     -v, --version
34             Print version.
35
36     -h, --help
37             Print help.
38
39     For example,
40
41     renice +1 987 -u daemon root -p 32
42
43     would change the priority of process ID's 987 and 32, and all processes
44     owned by users daemon and root.
45
46     Users other than the super-user may only alter the priority of processes
47     they own, and can only monotonically increase their ``nice value'' within
48     the range 0 to PRIO_MAX (20).  (This prevents overriding administrative
49     fiats.)  The super-user may alter the priority of any process and set the
50     priority to any value in the range PRIO_MIN (-20) to PRIO_MAX.  Useful
51     priorities are: 20 (the affected processes will run only when nothing
52     else in the system wants to), 0 (the ``base'' scheduling priority), any‐
53     thing negative (to make things go very fast).
54

FILES

56     /etc/passwd  to map user names to user ID's
57

SEE ALSO

59     getpriority(2), setpriority(2)
60

BUGS

62     Non super-users can not increase scheduling priorities of their own pro‐
63     cesses, even if they were the ones that decreased the priorities in the
64     first place.
65     The Linux kernel (at least version 2.0.0) and linux libc (at least ver‐
66     sion 5.2.18) does not agree entirely on what the specifics of the system‐
67     call interface to set nice values is.  Thus causes renice to report bogus
68     previous nice values.
69

HISTORY

71     The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD.
72

AVAILABILITY

74     The renice command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available
75     from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.
76
774th Berkeley Distribution        June 9, 1993        4th Berkeley Distribution
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