RENICE(8) BSD System Manager's Manual RENICE(8)NAMErenice — alter priority of running processes
SYNOPSISrenice [priority | [-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, user 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 prior‐
ity, 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 or user
ID's.
-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: 20 (the affected processes will run only when nothing
else in the system wants to), 0 (the ``base'' scheduling priority), any‐
thing negative (to make things go very fast).
FILES
/etc/passwd to map user names to user ID's
SEE ALSOnice(1), rtprio(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2)STANDARDS
The renice utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”).
HISTORY
The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD.
BUGS
Non super-users cannot increase scheduling priorities of their own pro‐
cesses, even if they were the ones that decreased the priorities in the
first place.
BSD June 9, 1993 BSD
