NAME

renice − alter nice value of running processes

SYNOPSIS

/etc/renice nice-value [ [ −p ] pid ... ] [ [ −g ] pgrp ... ] [ [ −u ] user ... ]

DESCRIPTION

renice alters the nice value of one or more running processes.  The nice value of a process affects the scheduling priority which is calculated by the kernel.  A higher nice value causes a less favorable scheduling priority.  The who parameters are interpreted as process ID’s, process group ID’s, or user names.  renice’ing a process group causes all processes in the process group to have their nice value altered.  renice’ing a user causes all processes owned by the user to have their nice value altered.  By default, the processes to be affected are specified by their process ID’s.  To force who parameters to be interpreted as process group ID’s, a −g may be specified.  To force the who parameters to be interpreted as user names, a −u may be given.  Supplying −p will reset who interpretation to be (the default) process ID’s.  For example, /etc/renice +1 987 -u daemon root -p 32 would change the nice value 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 nice value of processes they own, and can only monotonically increase their “nice value” within the range 0 to PRIO_MIN (20).  (This prevents overriding administrative fiats.)  The super-user may alter the nice value of any process and set the nice value to any value in the range PRIO_MAX (−20) to PRIO_MIN.  Useful nice values are: 19 (the affected processes will run only when nothing else in the system wants to), 0 (the “base” nice value), anything negative (to make things go very fast). 

FILES

/etc/passwdto map user names to user ID’s

SEE ALSO

getpriority(2), setpriority(2)

BUGS

Non super-users can not lower the nice value of their own processes. 

CX/UX User’s Reference Manual