NAME

       renice - alter priority of running processes

SYNOPSIS

       renice [--priority|--relative] priority [-g|-p|-u] 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 arguments are interpreted as process IDs (by default), process group
       IDs, user IDs, 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.

       If no -n, --priority or --relative option is used, then the priority is set as absolute.

OPTIONS

       -n priority
           Specify the absolute or relative (depending on environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT) scheduling
           priority to be used for the process, process group, or user. Use of the option -n is optional, but
           when used, it must be the first argument. See NOTES for more information.

       --priority priority
           Specify an absolute scheduling priority. Priority is set to the given value. This is the default,
           when no option is specified.

       --relative priority
           Specify a relative scheduling priority. Same as the standard POSIX -n option. Priority gets
           incremented/decremented by the given value.

       -g, --pgrp
           Interpret the succeeding arguments as process group IDs.

       -p, --pid
           Interpret the succeeding arguments as process IDs (the default).

       -u, --user
           Interpret the succeeding arguments as usernames or UIDs.

       -h, --help
           Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
           Print version and exit.

FILES

       /etc/passwd
           to map user names to user IDs

NOTES

       Users other than the superuser may only alter the priority of processes they own. Furthermore, an
       unprivileged user can only increase the "nice value" (i.e., choose a lower priority) and such changes are
       irreversible unless (since Linux 2.6.12) the user has a suitable "nice" resource limit (see ulimit(1p)
       and getrlimit(2)).

       The superuser may alter the priority of any process and set the priority to any value in the range -20 to
       19. Useful priorities are: 19 (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).

       For historical reasons in this implementation, the -n option did not follow the POSIX specification.
       Therefore, instead of setting a relative priority, it sets an absolute priority by default. As this may
       not be desirable, this behavior can be controlled by setting the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT to
       be fully POSIX compliant. See the -n option for details. See --relative and --priority for options that
       do not change behavior depending on environment variables.

HISTORY

       The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD.

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

SEE ALSO

       nice(1), chrt(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2), credentials(7), sched(7)

REPORTING BUGS

       For bug reports, use the issue tracker at https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.

AVAILABILITY

       The renice command is part of the util-linux package which can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
       <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>.