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@(#)acct.2 8.1 (Berkeley) 6/4/93
.Dd June 4, 1993 .Dt ACCT 2 .Os .Sh NAME .Nm acct .Nd enable or disable process accounting .Sh LIBRARY .Lb libc .Sh SYNOPSIS n unistd.h .Ft int .Fn acct "const char *file" .Sh DESCRIPTION The .Fn acct call enables or disables the collection of system accounting records. If .Fa file is .Dv NULL , accounting is disabled. If .Fa file is an existing, NUL-terminated, pathname, record collection is enabled, and for every process initiated which terminates under normal conditions an accounting record is appended to .Fa file . Abnormal conditions of termination are reboots or other fatal system problems. Records for processes which never terminate can not be produced by .Fn acct .
p For more information on the record structure used by .Fn acct , see
a /usr/include/sys/acct.h and .Xr acct 5 .
p This call is permitted only to the super-user. .Sh 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. For this purpose, .Fn acct creates a kernel thread called .Dq acctwatch . .Sh RETURN VALUES On success, zero is returned. Otherwise, -1 is returned and .Va errno is set to indicate the error. .Sh ERRORS .Fn acct will fail if one of the following is true: l -tag -width Er t Bq Er EACCES Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix, or the path name is not a regular file. t Bq Er EFAULT .Fa file points outside the process's allocated address space. t Bq Er EIO An I/O error occurred while reading from or writing to the file system. t Bq Er ELOOP Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname. t Bq Er ENAMETOOLONG A component of a pathname exceeded rq Dv NAME_MAX characters, or an entire path name exceeded rq Dv PATH_MAX characters. t Bq Er ENOENT The named file does not exist. t Bq Er ENOTDIR A component of the path prefix is not a directory. t Bq Er EPERM The caller is not the super-user. t Bq Er EROFS The named file resides on a read-only file system. .El
p Also, .Fn acct fails if failed to create kernel thread described above. See .Xr fork 2 for .Va errno value. .Sh SEE ALSO .Xr fork 2 , .Xr acct 5 , .Xr sa 8 .Sh HISTORY An .Fn acct function call appeared in .At v7 .