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.

util-linux                                          July 2014                                          RENICE(1)