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).
This page is part of release 3.14 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/.
