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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | FILES | NOTES | HISTORY | EXAMPLE | SEE ALSO | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY |
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RENICE(1) User Commands RENICE(1)
renice - alter priority of running processes
renice [-n|--priority|--relative] priority [-g|-p|-u]
identifier...
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.
By default, priority is understood as an absolute value. But when
option --relative is given, or when option -n is given and the
environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, then priority is
understood as a relative value.
-n priority|delta
Specify the absolute scheduling priority (when POSIXLY_CORRECT
is not set) or a relative priority (when POSIXLY_CORRECT is
set). See NOTES below for more details. Using option -n is
optional, but when used, it must be the first argument.
--priority priority
Specify the absolute scheduling priority to be used. This is
the default, when no option is specified.
--relative delta
Specify a relative priority. The actual scheduling priority
gets incremented/decremented by the given delta. (This is the
same as the -n option when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.)
-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
Display version and exit.
/etc/passwd
to map user names to user IDs
Users other than the superuser may alter the priority only of
processes they own. Furthermore, an unprivileged user can only
increase the "nice value" (that is: lower the urgency), and such
changes are irreversible unless (since Linux 2.6.12) the user has
a suitable "nice" resource limit (see 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, the -n option in this implementation does
not follow the POSIX specification: instead of setting a relative
priority, it sets an absolute priority by default. As this may not
be desirable, this behavior can be changed by setting the
environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT, to be fully POSIX compliant.
See --relative and --priority for options that do not change
behavior depending on environment variables.
The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD.
The following command changes 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
nice(1), chrt(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2), credentials(7),
sched(7)
For bug reports, use the issue tracker
<https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.
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
[email protected]. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2025-08-11. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that
was found in the repository was 2025-08-05.) 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 [email protected]
util-linux 2.42-start-521-ec46 2025-08-09 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)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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