5 dump-acct

dump-acct dumps some of the contents of one or more acct files in human readable form. Usage:

dump-acct [opts] files

Unless called with the --raw option, it prints a table with the following fields, separated by vertical bars(|):

ac_comm

name of the executed program

ac_version

version of the acct file format

ac_utime

user time

ac_stime

system time

ac_etime

elapsed time

ac_uid

user id

ac_gid

group id

ac_mem

(average) memory usage

ac_io

number of characters transferred on input/output

ac_pid

process id

ac_ppid

parent’s process id

All times will be given in platform dependent units (“AHZ”). Not all of the above columns will actually appear, depending on what information your operating system provides in it’s struct acct.

5.1 Flags

--ahz hz

Use this flag to tell the program what AHZ should be (in Hertz). This option is useful if you are trying to view an acct file created on another machine which has a different value for AHZ.

--byteswap

Swap the bytes (relative to your system’s native byte order) in --raw output.

--format

Set output format with --raw option.

-n num

--num num

Limit the number of lines (or records with --raw) to print.

-r

--reverse

Read the accounting file backwards (print latest record first).

-R

--raw

Don’t print human readable output, dump the raw record instead. Useful to convert between different Linux file formats (see below).

-h

--help

Print dump-acct’s usage string and default location of the accouning file to standard output.

--byteswap and --format options are only available with Linux multiformat support. They only affect output with the --raw option, format and byte order of the input are automatically detected. Thus they are useful to convert between different file formats.

The --ahz option affects input and output (except for v3 file format, which by definition is fixed to AHZ=100). If you ever need to convert between different AHZ values, use a two-step process: First convert to v3 format with the old AHZ value, then convert to the desired output format with the new AHZ setting.

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