acct(5)

acct5

Execution accounting file

Usage

#include <sys/acct.h>

Overview

The kernel maintains the following acct information structure for all processes. If a process terminates or misbehaves in specific ways, and accounting is enabled, the kernel calls the acct(2) function call to prepare and append the record to the accounting file.

/*
 * Accounting structures; these use a comp_t type which is a 3 bits base 8
 * exponent, 13 bit fraction floating point number.  Units are 1/AHZ
 * seconds.
 */
typedef u_int16_t comp_t;
struct acct {
	char	  ac_comm[24];	/* command name, incl NUL */
	comp_t	  ac_utime;	/* user time */
	comp_t	  ac_stime;	/* system time */
	comp_t	  ac_etime;	/* elapsed time */
	comp_t	  ac_io;	/* count of IO blocks */
	time_t	  ac_btime;	/* starting time */
	uid_t	  ac_uid;	/* user id */
	gid_t	  ac_gid;	/* group id */
	u_int32_t ac_mem;	/* average memory usage */
	dev_t	  ac_tty;	/* controlling tty, or -1 */
	pid_t	  ac_pid;	/* process id */
	u_int32_t ac_flag;	/* accounting flags */
#define	AFORK	0x00000001	/* fork'd but not exec'd */
#define	AMAP	0x00000004	/* killed by syscall or stack mapping violation */
#define	ACORE	0x00000008	/* dumped core */
#define	AXSIG	0x00000010	/* killed by a signal */
#define	APLEDGE	0x00000020	/* killed due to pledge violation */
#define	ATRAP	0x00000040	/* memory access violation */
#define	AUNVEIL	0x00000080	/* unveil access violation */
#define APINSYS 0x00000200      /* killed by syscall pin violation */
#define ABTCFI  0x00000400      /* BT CFI violation */
};
/*
 * 1/AHZ is the granularity of the data encoded in the comp_t fields.
 * This is not necessarily equal to hz.
 */
#define	AHZ	64
#ifdef _KERNEL
int	acct_process(struct proc *p);
int	acct_shutdown(void);
#endif

If a terminated or misbehaving process was created by an execve(2), the name of the executed file (at most ten characters of it) is saved in the field ac_comm and its status is saved by setting one or more of the following flags in ac_flag:

AFORK

A new process was created via fork(2) that was not followed by a call to execve(2).

AMAP

The process terminated abnormally due to a system call or stack mapping violation.

ACORE

The process terminated abnormally due to a signal and dumped core(5).

AXSIG

The process was killed by a signal(3).

APLEDGE

The process was killed due to a pledge(2) violation.

ATRAP

The process was killed due to a memory access violation detected by a processor trap.

AUNVEIL

The process attempted a file access that was prevented by unveil(2) restrictions. Note that this does not cause the process to terminate.

APINSYS

The command tried to execute a system call from the wrong system call instruction, see pinsyscalls(2).

ABTCFI

The command executed an indirect branch to a location that did not start with a ‘BTI’ instruction, and terminated with signal SIGILL, code ILL_BTCFI.

Releases

61 releases since OpenBSD 2.1; the text changed 16 times.

  1. 2.1–2.3
  2. 2.4
  3. 2.5–2.6
  4. 2.7
  5. 2.8–3.3
  6. 3.4–3.8
  7. 3.9–4.1
  8. 4.2–4.8
  9. 4.9–5.6
  10. 5.7–5.8
  11. 5.9–6.1
  12. 6.2–6.5
  13. 6.6–6.7
  14. 6.8
  15. 6.9–7.0
  16. 7.1–7.4
  17. 7.5–8.0

History

An acct file format first appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.