RENICE(1)

💖 RENICE(1) — the user commands girlies know her 💖

okay bestie sit DOWN because we're talking about renice, a User Commands icon from the manual, and she is lowkey the reason your runaway ffmpeg job stops eating your whole CPU 🍓

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✨ NAME ✨

renice — alter priority of running processes 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

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

like. that's it. that's the whole vibe. one priority, then a lil pile of identifiers, and the flags in between decide what those identifiers even mean 🦋

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

okay so renice alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes. not me calling it "altering the vibe of your processes" because honestly? that's what it is. 🌈

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. one little command, so much reach, main character energy fr fr 👑

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. yes this is confusing. yes we will get into it. iykyk 😭

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -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. (yes bestie, FIRST. she's not flexible about this. 🫶)
• --priority priority — Specify the absolute scheduling priority to be used. This is the default, when no option is specified. no drama, no environment variables, just absolute. iconic. ✨
• --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.) so if you're the kind of girlie who wants "just a lil bit nicer please" instead of "exactly 10", this is your girl 💜
• -g, --pgrp — Interpret the succeeding arguments as process group IDs. whole friend groups, not just one process. 🫂
• -p, --pid — Interpret the succeeding arguments as process IDs (the default). just the one bestie. 🙈
• -u, --user — Interpret the succeeding arguments as usernames or UIDs. yes it takes names AND numbers, we love a versatile queen 👑
• -h, --help — Display help text and exit. the "wait what were the flags again" button 🌸
• -V, --version — Display version and exit. 🎀

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🦋 FILES 🦋

• /etc/passwd — to map user names to user IDs

(yes she reads /etc/passwd when you hand her a username. she's gotta know who you're talking about, bestie. that's just due diligence 💅)

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🔥 NOTES 🔥

Users other than the superuser may alter the priority only of processes they own. Not your friend's processes. Not the system's processes. Yours. That's the rule and she is not bending it. 💀

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)). so like. you can be nice. you can be nicer. you cannot un-nice. it's giving "no take backs" and honestly? that's a whole mood 😭

bestie this is the part where you READ CAREFULLY. irreversible means irreversible. check your getrlimit(2) nice limit situation before you go clicking send on a big nice jump.

The superuser may alter the priority of any process and set the priority to any value in the range -20 to 19. Root really said "rules are for other people" and she's right, technically. 👑

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. ✨

so basically: -n is the chaotic one whose meaning depends on an environment variable, and --relative / --priority are the stable, emotionally available options. choose accordingly. 🫶

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🌈 HISTORY 🌈

The renice command appeared in 4.0BSD. she's old money, bestie. vintage. classic. an OG. 💜

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⭐ EXAMPLE ⭐

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

look at her switching between -u and -p mid-command like it's nothing. fluent. multilingual. slay. 💅✨

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🎀 SEE ALSO 🎀

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

(the whole scheduling friend group. go say hi. they don't bite 🦋)

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🐛 REPORTING BUGS 🐛

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

if something's broken, tell the devs, don't just vibe in silence bestie, they literally cannot fix what they can't see 🙈

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💖 AVAILABILITY 💖

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/>.

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mwah 💋 that's the whole page. this one's from util-linux 2.42.4, dated 2026-09-21 — go be nice to your processes (or don't, but know that it's permanent). periodt. 👑