Format
- renice [–n increment]
[–g|–p –u] ID …
- renice priority [–p] pid
… [–g pgrp …]
[–p pid …] [–u user
…]
- renice priority –g pgrp
… [–g pgrp …]
[–p pid …] [–u user
…]
- renice priority –u user
… [–g pgrp …]
[–p pid …] [–u user
…]
Description
renice changes
the priority of one or more running
processes. Normal users can change only the priority of processes
that have the same real or effective user ID as the real or effective
user ID of the process that calls renice.
Privileged users can set the priority of any process.
You can
specify the new priority as a decimal integer,
with higher values indicating more urgent priority. The range of priorities
is site-specific, and you may require appropriate privileges for some
priority values.
When you change the priority of a process
group, the priority of all processes in that group are changed.
If
the string -- appears in the arguments, renice does not interpret
it as the end of command-line arguments. This is an exception to the
usual POSIX syntax rules.
Options
- –g
- Treats all following IDs (or just pgrps
in the obsolescent versions) as process group IDs.
- –n increment
- Adjusts the system scheduling priority of the specified processes
by increment. Positive increments
lower the priority while negative increments
result in a higher priority.
Note: Negative increments
may require appropriate privileges.
- –p
- Treats all following IDs (or just pids
in the obsolescent versions) as process IDs.
- –u
- Treats all following IDs (or just users
in the obsolescent versions) as either user names or numeric user
IDs.
- priority
- A number that indicates an absolute priority value (higher numbers
reflect higher priorities).
If no –p, –g,
or –u option appears on the command line, renice assumes –p.
Localization
renice uses
the following localization environment variables:
- LANG
- LC_ALL
- LC_CTYPE
- LC_MESSAGES
- NLSPATH
See Localization for more
information.
Exit values
- 0
- Successful completion
- 1
- Failure due to one of the following:
- Incorrect command-line argument
- The wrong number of command-line arguments
- A priority that is outside the range
- An incorrect priority argument
- An incorrect ID argument
- Missing arguments following one of the options
- 2
- Failure because the system does not recognize the ID in
a –u option
Portability
POSIX.2 User Portability Extension, UNIX systems.
POSIX
considers all but the first form of the renice command
to be obsolescent.