NAME

       renice - alter priority of running processes

SYNOPSIS

       renice [-n] 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.

OPTIONS

       -n, --priority priority
              Specify the scheduling priority to be used for the process, process group, or user.
              Use  of the option -n or --priority is optional, but when used it must be the first
              argument.

       -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.

       -V, --version
              Display version information and exit.

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

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

NOTES

       Users  other than the superuser 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  19,  unless a nice resource limit is set (Linux 2.6.12 and higher).  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).

FILES

       /etc/passwd
              to map user names to user IDs

SEE ALSO

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

BUGS

       Non-superusers  cannot 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  Linux  Kernel
       Archive ⟨ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩.