NAME

renice − Alters the priority of a running process

SYNOPSIS

/usr/sbin/renice [−n increment] [−p] [−g | −u] ID ... 
/usr/sbin/renice priority [−p] pid ...  [−g pgrp ...] [−u user ...]

DESCRIPTION

The renice command alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes.  The arguments are interpreted as process IDs, process group IDs, or user names.  When you issue the renice command with the −g flag, all processes in the process group have their scheduling priority altered.  When you run the renice command with the −u flag, all processes owned by the user have their scheduling priority altered.  By default, the processes affected are specified by their process IDs. 

Only root can alter the priority of other user’s processes and can set the priority to any value in the range of -20 to 20.  Users without root privileges are restricted to altering the priority of processes they own and can only increase their "nice value" within the range of 0 to 20.  The following priorities are particularly useful:

20Runs affected processes when no other processes are running on the system

0Runs at the base scheduling priority

negative number
Runs affected processes very quickly.

The preceding values are mapped by the command to those actually used by the kernel. 

Note that users who do not have root privileges cannot increase the scheduling priorities of their own processes (even if they had originally decreased those priorities). 

FLAGS

-nTakes the current priority and adds the increment

-gInterprets arguments following the flag as process group IDs

-uInterprets arguments following the flag as usernames

-pResets renice argument interpretation to default process IDs

EXAMPLES

To change the priority of process IDs 987 and 32, and all processes owned by the daemon and root users, enter:

renice +1 987 -u daemon root -p 32

FILES

/usr/sbin/renice
Specifies the command path

RELATED INFORMATION

Functions: getpriority(2), setpriority(2)