RENICE
Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: July 2014
Page Index
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.
FILES
- /etc/passwd
-
to map user names to user IDs
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(1p)
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).
HISTORY
The
renice
command appeared in 4.0BSD.
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
-
SEE ALSO
nice(1),
chrt(1),
getpriority(2),
setpriority(2),
credentials(7),
sched(7)
AVAILABILITY
The renice command is part of the util-linux package and is available from
Linux Kernel Archive