renice(1) — Linux manual page
RENICE(1) User Commands RENICE(1)
NAME
renice - alter priority of running processes
SYNOPSIS
renice [--priority|--relative] 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.
If no -n, --priority or --relative option is used, then the
priority is set as absolute.
OPTIONS
-n priority
Specify the absolute or relative (depending on environment
variable POSIXLY_CORRECT) scheduling priority to be used for
the process, process group, or user. Use of the option -n is
optional, but when used, it must be the first argument. See
NOTES for more information.
--priority priority
Specify an absolute scheduling priority. Priority is set to
the given value. This is the default, when no option is
specified.
--relative priority
Specify a relative scheduling priority. Same as the standard
POSIX -n option. Priority gets incremented/decremented by the
given value.
-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.
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
-V, --version
Print version 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).
For historical reasons in this implementation, the -n option did
not follow the POSIX specification. Therefore, instead of setting
a relative priority, it sets an absolute priority by default. As
this may not be desirable, this behavior can be controlled by
setting the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT to be fully
POSIX compliant. See the -n option for details. See --relative
and --priority for options that do not change behavior depending
on environment variables.
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)
REPORTING BUGS
For bug reports, use the issue tracker at
https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.
AVAILABILITY
The renice command is part of the util-linux package which can be
downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
<https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page
is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
utilities) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have
a bug report for this manual page, send it to
util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2024-06-14. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
that was found in the repository was 2024-06-10.) If you discover
any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
or you have corrections or improvements to the information in
this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page),
send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
util-linux 2.39.594-1e0ad 2023-07-19 RENICE(1)
Pages that refer to this page: chrt(1), coresched(1), kill(1@@procps-ng), nice(1), skill(1), taskset(1), uclampset(1), getpriority(2), nice(2)