Unleash the accounting power with pacct

Did you know that you can log the completion of every single process running on your machine? You may even want to do this, for security, statistical purposes, load optimization, or any other administrative reason you may think of.

By default, process accounting (pacct) may not be activated on your machine. You might have to start it:

/usr/sbin/accton /var/account/pacct

Once this is done, every single process will be logged. You can find the logs under/var/account. The log itself is in binary form, so you will have to use a dumping utility to convert it to human-readable form.

To this end, you use the dump-acct utility.

dump-acct pacct

The output may be very long, depending on the activity on your machine and whether you rotate the logs, which you should, since the accounting logs can inflate very quickly.

dump-acct

And there you go, the list of all processes ran on our host since the moment we activated the accounting. The output is printed in nice columns and includes the following, from left to right: process name, user time, system time, effective time, UID, GID, memory, and date.

Other ways of starting accounting may be in the following forms:

/etc/init.d/psacct start

Or:

/etc/init.d/acct start

In fact, starting accounting using the init script is the preferred way of doing things. However, you should note that accounting is not a service in the typical form. The init script does not look for a running process - it merely checks for the lock file under /var. Therefore, if you turn the accounting on/off using the accton command, the init scripts won't be aware of this and may report false results.

BTW, turning accounting off with accton is done just like that:

/usr/sbin/accton

When no file is specified, the accounting is turned off. When the command is run against a file, as we've demonstrated earlier, the accounting process is started. You should be careful when activating/deactivating the accounting and stick to one method of management, either via the accton command or using the init scripts.

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