RENICE(1) User Commands RENICE(1)

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 schedul-
ing priority altered.
OPTIONS
-n, --priority priority
Specify the scheduling priority to be used for the process, process group, or user. Use of the op-
tion -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 unprivi-
leged user can only increase the ‘‘nice value’’ (i.e., choose a lower priority) and such changes are irre-
versible unless (since Linux 2.6.12) the user has a suitable ‘‘nice’’ resource limit (see ulimit(1p) and getr-
limit(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 pro-
cesses 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 〈https://
www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/〉.

util-linux July 2014 1