renice

renice will allow you to alter the scheduling priority of a process that is viewed as the target, which is usually the PID.

Options

-u targets interpreted as usernames

-p targets interpreted as PIDs

This example shows a new instance of top is initiated so that there are two instances of top running. Next the example shows that renice is used to change the priority of top. Remember positive numbers lower the priority and negative numbers will increase the priority. It shows that top is reduced in priority from 0 to 19.

top &

[2] 17660

[2] Stopped top

mike@ub:~$ renice 20 17660

17660: old priority 0, new priority 19

jobs

[1]+ Stopped top

[2] Stopped top