accton(8)

accton8

Enable/disable system accounting

Usage

accton [file]

Overview

With an argument naming an existing file, accton causes system accounting information for every process executed to be placed at the end of the file. If no argument is given, accounting is turned off.

To have accton enabled at boot time, use “rcctl enable accounting”, which sets

accounting=YES

in rc.conf.local(8).

Log rotation of the default accounting file, /var/account/acct, is performed by the daily(8) maintenance script.

Files

/var/account/acct

default accounting file

Exit status

The accton utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

Releases

61 releases since OpenBSD 2.1; the text changed 9 times.

  1. 2.1–2.5
  2. 2.6
  3. 2.7
  4. 2.8–2.9
  5. 3.0–4.0
  6. 4.1
  7. 4.2
  8. 4.3–6.6
  9. 6.7–6.8
  10. 6.9–8.0

History

The accton command 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.