NAME

       renice — alter priority of running processes

SYNOPSIS

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

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:

       -n, --priority
               The scheduling priority of the process, process group, or user.

       -g, --pgrp
               Force who parameters to be interpreted as process group ID's.

       -u, --user
               Force the who parameters to be interpreted as user names.

       -p, --pid
               Resets the who interpretation to be (the default) process ID's.

       -v, --version
               Print version.

       -h, --help
               Print help.

       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'' (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 priorities
       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 ALSO

       getpriority(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  version  5.2.18)  does  not  agree
       entirely  on what the specifics of the systemcall 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
       ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.

util-linux                                      November 2010                                        RENICE(1)()