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RENICE(1)                                           User Commands                                           RENICE(1)



NAME
       renice - alter priority of running processes

SYNOPSIS
       renice [-n] priority [-gpu] 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 sched‐
       uling 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 pgid...
              Force the succeeding arguments to be interpreted as process group IDs.

       -u, --user name_or_uid...
              Force the succeeding arguments to be interpreted as usernames or UIDs.

       -p, --pid pid...
              Force the succeeding arguments to be interpreted as process IDs (the default).

       -h, --help
              Display a help text.

       -V, --version
              Display version information.

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 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), any‐
       thing negative (to make things go very fast).

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

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



util-linux                                          September 2011                                          RENICE(1)