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acct(2) System Calls Manual acct(2) NAME acct - Enables and disables process accounting SYNOPSIS int acct ( char *path ); PARAMETERS Specifies a pointer to the pathname of the file, or specifies a null pointer. DESCRIPTION The acct() function enables and disables UNIX process accounting. When enabled, process accounting produces an accounting record on behalf of each terminating process. The path parameter specifies the pathname of the file to which an accounting record is written. When the path para- meter is 0 (zero) or a null value, the acct() function disables the ac- counting routine. If the path parameter refers to a symbolic link, the acct() function writes records to the file pointed to by the symbolic link. If Network File System is installed on your system, the accounting file can reside on another node. To ensure accurate accounting, each node must have its own accounting file, which can be located on any node in the network. The calling process must have superuser privilege to enable or disable process accounting. RETURN VALUES Upon successful completion, the acct() function returns a value of 0 (zero). Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned and errno is set to indi- cate the error. ERRORS If the acct() function fails, errno may be set to one of the following values: The calling process does not have appropriate system privilege. The file named by the path parameter does not exist. The file named by the path parameter is not an ordinary file. Write permission is denied for the named accounting file. The named file re- sides on a read-only file system. RELATED INFORMATION Functions: exit(2), sigaction(2), sigvec(2), expacct(3), raise(3) delim off acct(2)