renice Command: Tutorial & Examples

Alter the priority of a running process

The renice command is a Linux utility that allows you to change the priority of a running process. When you run a program on a Linux system, the kernel assigns it a priority level based on various factors such as the scheduling algorithm being used, the priority of the process's parent process, and the nice value of the process. The nice value is a number that can range from -20 (highest priority) to 19 (lowest priority).

The renice command allows you to adjust the priority of a process by changing its nice value. This can be useful if you have a process that is using a lot of system resources and you want to give other processes a higher priority, or if you have a process that is running too slowly and you want to give it a higher priority to make it run faster.

To use the renice command, you will need to specify the new nice value and the process ID of the process that you want to adjust. For example, to give a process with a process ID of 123 a higher priority, you might use the following command:

renice -n -10 123

This would set the nice value of the process with a ID of 123 to -10, which would give it a higher priority.

It's important to note that you will need to have root privileges to use the renice command, as it allows you to change the priority of processes that you don't own.