---
name: "renice"
section: "8"
platform: "openbsd"
package: "man"
version: "8.0-current-20261101"
release: "OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01)"
platforms: ["linux", "freebsd", "openbsd", "macos"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/renice/8"
---

# renice(8)

alter priority of running processes

## NAME

**renice** – alter priority of running processes

## SYNOPSIS

**renice** \[**-n**\] *increment* \[**-gpu**\] *id*

## DESCRIPTION

**renice** alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes with ID *id*. Processes may be selected by process ID, process group ID, and user name or ID. If none of the **-gpu** options are specified, the default is to select by process ID. Multiple processes can be specified in a space separated list.

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), which 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 priority), anything negative (to make things go very fast).

The options are as follows:

- **-g**

  Alter the scheduling priority of all processes in process group *id*.

- **-n** *increment*

  A positive or negative decimal integer used to modify the scheduling priority. For compatibility with historic versions of this utility, if **-n** is omitted and *increment* is the first argument to **renice**, then *increment* is taken as an absolute priority rather than an increment.

- **-p**

  Alter the scheduling priority of process *id*.

- **-u**

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

## FILES

- */etc/passwd*

  for mapping user names to user IDs

## EXIT STATUS

The **renice** utility exits 0 on success, and \>0 if an error occurs.

## 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)](/nice/1.md), [getpriority(2)](/getpriority/2.md), [setpriority(2)](/setpriority/2.md)

## STANDARDS

The **renice** utility is compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”) specification, except the way in which processes are specified differs.

The historical behavior of passing *increment* as an absolute priority is supported for backwards compatibility.

## HISTORY

The **renice** command appeared in 4.0BSD.

## BUGS

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