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
priority altered. The renice'ing of a user causes all processes owned by
the user to have their scheduling priority altered. By default, the pro-
cesses 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 prior-
ity, 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 monotonically 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 prior-
ity), 0 (the ``base'' scheduling priority), anything negative (lower val-
ues cause more favorable scheduling).
FILES
/etc/passwd to map user names to user ID's
SEE ALSO
nice(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 pro-
cesses, even if they were the ones that decreased the priorities in the
first place.
BSD June 9, 1993 BSD
Mac OS X 10.8 - Generated Tue Sep 4 09:02:54 CDT 2012