Preface
Way back a long time ago, Thompson and Ritchie were sitting opposite one
another at the commissary, sipping coffees and discussing their evolving
behemoth.
“This behemoth of ours,” said Ken, “is becoming rather popular,
wouldn’t you say?” “Yes,” said Dennis. “Every time I want to do a
compilation, I have to wait for hours and hours. It’s infuriating.”
They both agreed that the load on their system was too great. Both
sighed, picked up their mugs, and went back to the workbench. Little
did they know that an upper-management type was sitting just within
earshot of their conversation.
“We are AT&T Bell Laboratories, aren’t we?” the upper-management type
thought to himself. “Well, what is our organization best known for?”
The brill-cream in his hair glistened. “Screwing people out of lots of
money, of course! If there were some way that we could keep tabs on
users and charge them through the nose for their CPU time...”
The accounting utilities were born.
Seriously though, the accouting utilities can provide a system
administrator with useful information about system usage—connections,
programs executed, and utilization of system resources.
Information about users—their connect time, location, programs
executed, and the like—is automatically recored in files by
init and login. Four of them are of interest to us:
wtmp, which has records for each login and logout;
acct, which records each command that was run;
usracct and savacct, which contain
summaries of the information in acct by user and
command, respectively. Each of the accounting utilities reports or
summarizes information stored in these files.
acprints statistics about users’ connect time. ac can tell you how
long a particular user or group of users were connected to your system,
printing totals by day or for all of the entries in the
wtmp file.
acctonturns accounting on or off.
lastcommlists the commands executed on the system, most recent first, showing
the run state of each command. With last, you can search the
acct file for a particular user, terminal, or command.
sasummarizes the information in the acct file into the
savacct and usracct file. It also
generates reports about commands, giving the number of invocations, cpu
time used, average core usage, etc.
dump-acctdump-utmpdisplay acct and utmp files in a human-readable format.
For more detailed information on any of these programs, check the
chapter with the program title.
A Note on File Names and Locations
The wtmp and acct files seem to live in different places
and have different names for every variant of u*x that exists. The name
wtmp seems to be standard for the login accounting file, but the
process accounting file might be acct or pacct on your
system. To find the actual locations and names of these files on your
system, specify the --help flag to any of the programs in this
package and the information will dumped to standard output.
Regardless of the names and locations of files on your system, this
manual will refer to the login accounting file as wtmp and the
process accounting files as acct, savacct, and
usracct.
History of the Accounting Utilities
I don’t have any idea who originally wrote these utilities. If anybody
does, please send some mail to [email protected] and I’ll add
your information here!
Since the first alpha versions of this software in late 1993, many
people have contributed to the package. They are (in alphabetical
order):
Eric Backus <[email protected]>Suggested fixes for HP-UX 9.05 using /bin/cc: configure assumed you were
using gcc and tacked on -Wall etc. He also noticed that
file_rd.c was doing pointer arithmetic on a void * pointer
(non-ANSI).
Christoph Badura <[email protected]>Christoph was a BIG HELP in computing statistics, most notably k*sec
stuff! He also did Xenix testing and contributed some Makefile fixes
and output optimizations.
Michael Calwas <[email protected]>Fixed bugs in mktime.c.
Derek Clegg <[email protected]>Suggested the simple, elegant fix for *_rd_never_used brain-damage.
Alan Cox <[email protected]>Original Linux kernel accounting patches.
Scott Crosby <[email protected]>Suggested idea behind --sort-real-time for sa.
Solar Designer <[email protected]>Added code for --ahz flag in lastcomm and sa.
Dirk Eddelbuettel <[email protected]>Managed bug-fixes & etc. for Debian distribution, as well as the
architect of merge of GNU + Debian distributions. A big thanks to Dirk
for kicking me back into gear again after a long period of no work on
this project.
Jason Grant <[email protected]>Identified a buffer-overrun bug in sa.
Kaveh R. Ghazi <[email protected]>Tested the package on many systems with compilers other than gcc. Fixed
K&R C support.
Susan Kleinmann <[email protected]>Contributed excellent man pages!
Alexander Kourakos <[email protected]>Inspired the --wide option for last.
Marek Michalkiewicz <[email protected]>Suggested the --ip-address flag for last.
David S. Miller <[email protected]>Noticed missing GNU-standard makefile rules.
Walter Mueller <[email protected]>Noticed install target was missing, and corrected a typo for prefix in
Makefile.in.
Ian Murdock <[email protected]>Tracked down miscellaneous bugs in sa.c under Linux. Added Debian
package maintenance files.
Tuomo Pyhala <[email protected]>Reported buggy --strict-match flag in lastcomm.
Tim Schmielau <[email protected]>Added Linux multiformat support.
Luc I. Suryo <[email protected]>Suggested the --user flag for lastcomm.
Pedro A M Vazquez <[email protected]>Fixed bugs in sa.c and tested under FreeBSD.
Marco van Wieringen <[email protected]>Modified (wrote?) Linux kernel accounting patches.