RENICE(8)               OpenBSD System Manager's Manual              RENICE(8)

NAME
     renice - alter priority of running processes

SYNOPSIS
     renice -n increment [[-g] pgrp ...] [[-p] pid ...] [[-u] user ...]

DESCRIPTION
     renice alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes by
     increment.  Processes may be selected using the parameters pid (process
     ID), pgrp (process group ID), and user (user name or ID).  If no flag is
     specified, the default is to select by process ID.

     Users other than the superuser 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 superuser 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 priori-
     ty), anything negative (to make things go very fast).

     The options are as follows:

     -g pgrp ...
             Alter the scheduling priority of all processes in process group
             pgrp.

     -n increment
             A positive or negative decimal integer used to modify the
             scheduling priority.

     -p pid ...
             Alter the scheduling priority of process pid.

     -u user ...
             Alter the scheduling priority of all processes belonging to user,
             which may be a user name or ID.

FILES
     /etc/passwd  for mapping user names to user IDs

EXAMPLES
     The following example changes the priority of process IDs 987 and 32, and
     all processes owned by users daemon and root:

           # renice -n +1 987 -u daemon root -p 32

SEE ALSO
     nice(1), getpriority(2), setpriority(2)

STANDARDS
     The renice utility is compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (``POSIX'')
     specification.

     The historical behavior of passing the increment as the first argument is
     supported for backwards compatibility.

     The arguments to flags [-gpu] are extensions to that specification.

HISTORY
     The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD.

BUGS
     Non-superusers cannot increase scheduling priorities of their own pro-
     cesses, even if they were the ones that decreased the priorities in the
     first place.

OpenBSD 4.7                    February 9, 2009                              2
