RENICE(8) | System Manager's Manual | RENICE(8)

# NAME

`renice` —
alter priority of running processes

# SYNOPSIS

`renice` | priority [[`-p`] pid ...] [`-g` pgrp ...] [`-u` user ...]

`renice` | `-n` increment [[`-p`] pid ...] [`-g` pgrp ...] [`-u` user ...]

# 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 processes 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`:

`-g`
  Force who parameters to be interpreted as process group ID's.
`-n`
  Instead of changing the specified processes to the given priority, interpret the following argument as an increment to be applied to the current priority of each process.
`-u`
  Force the who parameters to be interpreted as user names.
`-p`
  Resets the who interpretation to be (the default) process ID's.

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'' within the range 0 to `PRIO_MAX` (20). (This prevents overriding administrative fiats.) 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: 0, the ``base'' scheduling priority; 20, the affected processes will run only when nothing at the base priority wants to; anything negative, the processes will receive a scheduling preference.

# FILES

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

# SEE ALSO

nice(1), prenice(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2)

# HISTORY

The `renice` command appeared in 4.0BSD.

# 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.

December 6, 2012 | NetBSD 9.0