June 9, 1993 RENICE 8

### NAME

renice - alter priority of running processes

### SYNOPSIS

renice priority [[-p] pid ...] pgrp ... [-g] user ... [-u] renice -n increment pid ... [[-p]] pgrp ... [-g] user ... [-u]

### DESCRIPTION

renice alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes. The following who parameters are interpreted as process ID's, process group ID's, or user names. Ns'ing a process group causes all processes in the process group to have their scheduling priority altered. Ns'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.

Options supported by :

-g
  Force who parameters to be interpreted as process group ID's.

-n
  Instead of changing the specified processes to the given priority, interpret the following argument as an increment to be applied to the current priority of each process.

-u
  Force the who parameters to be interpreted as user names.

-p
  Resets the who interpretation to be (the default) process ID's.

For example,

  `

      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.

Users other than the super-user may only alter the priority of processes they own, and can only monotonically increase their ``nice value'' within the range 0 to ```PRIO_MAX` (20). (This prevents overriding administrative fiats.) 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: 0, the ``base'' scheduling priority; 20, the affected processes will run only when nothing at the base priority wants to; anything negative, the processes will receive a scheduling preference.

### FILES

```/etc/passwd`
  to map user names to user ID's

### SEE ALSO

nice(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2)

### HISTORY

The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD.

### 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.