renice(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | FILES | NOTES | HISTORY | EXAMPLE | SEE ALSO | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY

RENICE(1)                     User Commands                     RENICE(1)

NAME         top

       renice - alter priority of running processes

SYNOPSIS         top

       renice [-n|--priority|--relative] priority [-g|-p|-u]
       identifier...

DESCRIPTION         top

       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.

OPTIONS         top

       -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.

FILES         top

       /etc/passwd
           to map user names to user IDs

NOTES         top

       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.

HISTORY         top

       The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD.

EXAMPLE         top

       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

SEE ALSO         top

       nice(1), chrt(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2), credentials(7),
       sched(7)

REPORTING BUGS         top

       For bug reports, use the issue tracker
       <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.

AVAILABILITY         top

       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
       util-linux@vger.kernel.org. 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 man-pages@man7.org

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)