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.\" @(#)renice.8 8.1 (Berkeley) 6/9/93
.\"
.TH RENICE "1" "September 2011" "util-linux" "User Commands"
.SH NAME
renice \- alter priority of running processes
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B renice
-n priority [options] <pid> [...]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B Renice
alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes. The
following
.I who
parameters are interpreted as process ID's, process group ID's, or user
names.
.BR Renice 'ing
a process group causes all processes in the process group to have their
scheduling priority altered.
.BR 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.
.PP
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
\fB\-n\fR, \fB\-\-priority\fR \fIpriority\fR
The scheduling
.I priority
of the process, process group, or user. Use of
.BR \-n " or " \-\-priority
can only exist as the first argument of
.B renice
command.
.TP
\fB\-g\fR, \fB\-\-pgrp\fR \fIpgid\fR
Force
.I who
parameters to be interpreted as \fIprocess group ID\fR's.
.TP
\fB\-u\fR, \fB\-\-user\fR \fIname\fR or \fIuid\fR
Force the
.I who
parameters to be interpreted as \fIuser name\fR or \fIid\fR.
.TP
\fB\-p\fR, \fB\-\-pid\fR \fIprocess id\fR
Resets the
.I who
interpretation to be (the default) \fIprocess ID\fR's.
.TP
\fB\-v\fR, \fB\-\-version\fR
Print version.
.TP
\fB\-h\fR, \fB\-\-help\fR
Print help.
.SH EXAMPLES
.TP
.B 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.
.SH 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
.BR 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
.BR PRIO_MIN \ (\-20)
to
.BR 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), anything
negative (to make things go very fast).
.SH FILES
.TP
.B /etc/passwd
to map user names to user ID's
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR getpriority (2),
.BR setpriority (2)
.SH 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.
.PP
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.
.SH HISTORY
The
.B renice
command appeared in 4.0BSD.
.SH AVAILABILITY
The renice command is part of the util-linux package and is available from
.UR ftp://\:ftp.kernel.org\:/pub\:/linux\:/utils\:/util-linux/
Linux Kernel Archive
.UE .
