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RENICE

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: July 2014
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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. 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(1) 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).

FILES

/etc/passwd: to map user names to user IDs

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