.\" Copyright (c) 1980 Regents of the University of California.
.\" All rights reserved. The Berkeley software License Agreement
.\" specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution.
.\" @(#)acct.2 6.4 (Berkeley) %G%
acct \- turn accounting on or off
The system is prepared to write a record
for each process as it terminates.
call, with a null-terminated string naming an existing file
as argument, turns on accounting;
records for each terminating process are appended to
An argument of 0 causes accounting to be turned off.
The accounting file format is given in
This call is permitted only to the super-user.
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.
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.
will fail if one of the following is true:
The caller is not the super-user.
A component of the path prefix is not a directory.
The pathname contains a character with the high-order bit set.
A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters,
or an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters.
The named file does not exist.
Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix,
or the path name is not a regular file.
Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname.
The named file resides on a read-only file system.
points outside the process's allocated address space.
An I/O error occurred while reading from or writing to the file system.
No accounting is produced for programs running
In particular non-terminating programs are never