ACCT(2)                   FreeBSD System Calls Manual                  ACCT(2)

NAME
     acct - enable or disable process accounting

LIBRARY
     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS
     #include <unistd.h>

     int
     acct(const char *file);

DESCRIPTION
     The acct() system call enables or disables the collection of system
     accounting records.  If the argument file is a null pointer, accounting
     is disabled.  If file is an existing pathname (null-terminated), record
     collection is enabled and for every process initiated which terminates
     under normal conditions an accounting record is appended to file.
     Abnormal conditions of termination are reboots or other fatal system
     problems.  Records for processes which never terminate cannot be produced
     by acct().

     For more information on the record structure used by acct(), see
     <sys/acct.h> and acct(5).

     This call is permitted only to the super-user.

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.  The values controlling this behaviour can be modified
     using the following sysctl(8) variables:

     kern.acct_chkfreq      Specifies the frequency (in seconds) with which
                            free disk space should be checked.

     kern.acct_resume       The percentage of free disk space above which
                            process accounting will resume.

     kern.acct_suspend      The percentage of free disk space below which
                            process accounting will suspend.

RETURN VALUES
     On error -1 is returned.  The file must exist and the call may be
     exercised only by the super-user.

ERRORS
     The acct() system call will fail if one of the following is true:

     [EPERM]            The caller is not the super-user.

     [ENOTDIR]          A component of the path prefix is not a directory.

     [ENAMETOOLONG]     A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters, or
                        an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters.

     [ENOENT]           The named file does not exist.

     [EACCES]           Search permission is denied for a component of the
                        path prefix, or the path name is not a regular file.

     [ELOOP]            Too many symbolic links were encountered in
                        translating the pathname.

     [EROFS]            The named file resides on a read-only file system.

     [EFAULT]           The file argument points outside the process's
                        allocated address space.

     [EIO]              An I/O error occurred while reading from or writing to
                        the file system.

     [EINTEGRITY]       Corrupted data was detected while reading from the
                        file system.

SEE ALSO
     acct(5), accton(8), sa(8)

HISTORY
     The acct() function appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6         March 30, 2020         FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6