ACCT

Section: System Calls (2)
Updated: May 22, 1986
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NAME

acct - turn accounting on or off

SYNOPSIS

acct(file)
char *file;

DESCRIPTION

The system is prepared to write a record in an accounting file for each process as it terminates. This call, with a null-terminated string naming an existing file as argument, turns on accounting; records for each terminating process are appended to file. An argument of 0 causes accounting to be turned off.

The accounting file format is given in acct(5).

This call is permitted only to the super-user.

NOTES

Accounting is automatically disabled when the file system the accounting file resides on runs out of space; it is enabled when space once again becomes available.

RETURN VALUE

On error -1 is returned. The file must exist and the call may be exercised only by the super-user. It is erroneous to try to turn on accounting when it is already on.

ERRORS

Acct will fail if one of the following is true:

[EPERM]: The caller is not the super-user.
[ENOTDIR]: A component of the path prefix is not a directory.
[EINVAL]: The pathname contains a character with the high-order bit set.
[ENAMETOOLONG]: A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters, or an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters.
[ENOENT]: The named file does not exist.
[EACCES]: Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix, or the path name is not a regular file.
[ELOOP]: Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname.
[EROFS]: The named file resides on a read-only file system.
[EFAULT]: File points outside the process's allocated address space.
[EIO]: An I/O error occurred while reading from or writing to the file system.

BUGS

No accounting is produced for programs running when a crash occurs. In particular non-terminating programs are never accounted for.

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