NAME¶

acct - switch process accounting on or off

LIBRARY¶

Standard C library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS¶

#include <unistd.h>

int acct(const char *_Nullable filename);

acct():

    Since glibc 2.21:


        _DEFAULT_SOURCE


    In glibc 2.19 and 2.20:


        _DEFAULT_SOURCE || (_XOPEN_SOURCE && _XOPEN_SOURCE < 500)


    Up to and including glibc 2.19:


        _BSD_SOURCE || (_XOPEN_SOURCE && _XOPEN_SOURCE < 500)

DESCRIPTION¶

The acct() system call enables or disables process accounting. If called with the name of an existing file as its argument, accounting is turned on, and records for each terminating process are appended to filename as it terminates. An argument of NULL causes accounting to be turned off.

RETURN VALUE¶

On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS¶

EACCES

Write permission is denied for the specified file, or search permission is denied for one of the directories in the path prefix of filename (see also path_resolution(7)), or filename is not a regular file.

EFAULT

filename points outside your accessible address space.

EIO

Error writing to the file filename.

EISDIR

filename is a directory.

ELOOP

Too many symbolic links were encountered in resolving filename.

ENAMETOOLONG

filename was too long.

ENFILE

The system-wide limit on the total number of open files has been reached.

ENOENT

The specified file does not exist.

ENOMEM

Out of memory.

ENOSYS

BSD process accounting has not been enabled when the operating system kernel was compiled. The kernel configuration parameter controlling this feature is CONFIG_BSD_PROCESS_ACCT.

ENOTDIR

A component used as a directory in filename is not in fact a directory.

EPERM

The calling process has insufficient privilege to enable process accounting. On Linux, the CAP_SYS_PACCT capability is required.

EROFS

filename refers to a file on a read-only filesystem.

EUSERS

There are no more free file structures or we ran out of memory.

STANDARDS¶

SVr4, 4.3BSD (but not POSIX).

NOTES¶

No accounting is produced for programs running when a system crash occurs. In particular, nonterminating processes are never accounted for.

The structure of the records written to the accounting file is described in acct(5).

SEE ALSO¶

acct(5)