Displaying process priority with the ps command

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The -l (lowercase L) flag of the ps command displays the nice values and current priority values of the specified processes.

For example, you can display the priorities of all of the processes owned by a given user with the following:

# ps -lu user1
       F S UID  PID PPID   C PRI NI ADDR    SZ    WCHAN    TTY  TIME CMD
  241801 S 200 7032 7286   0  60 20 1b4c   108           pts/2  0:00 ksh
  200801 S 200 7568 7032   0  70 25 2310    88  5910a58  pts/2  0:00 vmstat
  241801 S 200 8544 6494   0  60 20 154b   108           pts/0  0:00 ksh

The output shows the result of the nice -n 5 command described previously. Process 7568 has an inferior priority of 70. (The ps command was run by a separate session in superuser mode, hence the presence of two TTYs.)

If one of the processes had used the setpri(10758, 59) subroutine to give itself a fixed priority, a sample ps -l output would be as follows:

       F S UID   PID  PPID   C PRI NI ADDR    SZ    WCHAN    TTY  TIME CMD
  200903 S   0 10758 10500   0  59 -- 3438    40  4f91f98  pts/0  0:00 fixpri