RENICE(1)                                          BSD General Commands Manual                                         RENICE(1)

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'' within the range 0 to PRIO_MAX (20).  (This prevents overriding administrative fiats.)  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'' sched-
     uling 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-ng package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-
     linux-ng/.

4th Berkeley Distribution                                 June 9, 1993                                 4th Berkeley Distribution