• NAME
  
  acct - switch process accounting on or off
• SYNOPSIS
  

  
   #include <unistd.h>
  
   int acct(const char * filename );
  
  
    Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see
  
  
    feature_test_macros(7) ):
  
   
  
      acct ():
  
   _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 appropriately.
  
• 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 limit on the total number of open files has been reached.
  

  ENOENT

  The specified filename 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 file system.
  

  EUSERS

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

• CONFORMING TO
  
  SVr4, 4.3BSD (but not POSIX).
  
  
  
  
  
  
• NOTES
  
  No accounting is produced for programs running when a system crash occurs.
  In particular, non-terminating processes are never accounted for.
  
  The structure of the records written to the accounting file is described in
  acct(5) .
  
• SEE ALSO
  
  acct(5)
  
• COLOPHON
  
  This page is part of release 3.19 of the Linux
  man-pages
  project.
  A description of the project,
  and information about reporting bugs,
  can be found at
  http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
  

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