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RENICE(8)                 BSD System Manager's Manual                RENICE(8)

NAME
     renice -- alter priority of running processes

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

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

     The following options are available:

     -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 or user ID's.

     -p      Reset 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 mono-tonically monotonically
     tonically 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: 20 (the affected processes
     will run at the lowest priority), 0 (the ``base'' scheduling priority), anything negative (lower values
     cause more favorable scheduling).

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

SEE ALSO
     nice(1), rtprio(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2)

STANDARDS
     The renice utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1'').

HISTORY
     The renice utility appeared in 4.0BSD.

BUGS
     Non super-users cannot increase scheduling priorities of their own processes, even if they were the
     ones that decreased the priorities in the first place.

BSD                              June 9, 1993                              BSD