RENICE

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: June 24, 1990
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NAME

renice - alter priority of running processes

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

Renice alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes. 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 scheduling priority 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. Supplying -p will reset who interpretation to be (the default) process ID's.

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

FILES

/etc/passwd to map user names to user ID's

BUGS

Non super-users can not increase scheduling priorities of their own processes, even if they were the ones that decreased the priorities in the first place.

SPRITE

Renice on Sprite must map Unix priorities in the range -20 to 20 into one of the five Sprite priorities. The mapping is done as follows:
-20 --- -20 -> -20
-19 --- -10 -> -10

-9 ---   9 ->  0

10 ---  19 -> 10

20 ---  20 -> 20
For example, renice'ing a process to priority 9 will cause it to run at the same priority as processes reniced to -9 through 9.

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Time: 04:54:18 GMT, January 31, 2023