NAME    [Toc]    [Back]

     renice - alter priority of running processes

SYNOPSIS    [Toc]    [Back]

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

DESCRIPTION    [Toc]    [Back]

     renice alters the scheduling priority (an integer) of one or
more running
     processes.  The following who parameters (pid, pgrp and  user) are interpreted
  as  process  IDs,  process group IDs, or user names.
reniceing a
     process group causes all processes in the process  group  to
have their
     scheduling  priority  altered.   reniceing 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 IDs.

     The options are as follows:

     -g      Force who parameters to be  interpreted  as  process
group IDs.

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

     -p      Resets the who interpretation to  be  (the  default)
process IDs.

     For example,

     # renice +1 987 -u daemon root -p 32

     would change the priority of process IDs 987 and 32, and all
processes
     owned by users daemon and root.

     Users other than the superuser 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 superuser 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 only
when nothing
     else in the system wants to),  0  (the  ``base''  scheduling
priority), anything
 negative (to make things go very fast).

FILES    [Toc]    [Back]

     /etc/passwd  for mapping user names to user IDs

SEE ALSO    [Toc]    [Back]

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

HISTORY    [Toc]    [Back]

     The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD.

BUGS    [Toc]    [Back]

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

OpenBSD      3.6                           June      9,      1993