Welcome to the GNU Accounting Utilities package! This is a set of utilities which reports and summarizes data about user connect times and process execution statistics under u*x. This package contains: ac: summarize login accounting accton: turn process accounting on or off last: show the people who have logged in lastcomm: show which commands have been used sa: summarizes process accounting dump-utmp: print a utmp file in a human-readble format dump-acct: same as above for acct/pacct files See the file `INSTALL' for generic instructions on how to compile and install this software. See the file `NEWS' for late-breaking news about this version. See the file `ChangeLog' for an up-to-date list of source-level modifications. A big thanks to Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@econ.queensu.ca> for motivation! NOTE: if you're installing this package to replace your system's accounting utilities, you will need to delete the "usracct" and "savacct" files written by your system's sa, as GNU sa is not able to read them (formats vary too widely between systems). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The usual: * If you run into a bug, please send a "good" bug report -- a message that contains detailed instructions that allow me to reproduce the bug. * If you can make a patch for a particular problem, great! But if you modify more than 10 lines, I need to worry about disclaimers and copyright stuff. Let's try this: if you find a bug, report it and I'll let you know whether or not I've been working on the problem (or want to do so). We can proceed from there. As a maintainer, I want to make sure that folks are not duplicating work. * Straightforward testing: "./configure; make compare" and check the output files (compare-*) in the source directory (should show times and etc.). * If this package isn't finding your utmp/pacct files correctly, check the file configure.in script (files.h is now automatically generated from the results of that script). * Any suggestions for better output from the dump-acct and dump-utmp programs? I'm not sure what format will be easiest to parse. * If you see slightly different numbers for output with GNU sa compared with your system's sa, it's probably due to round-off error (vendor utils use floats, we use doubles). Check it, however, and send me a report. * PLEASE SUGGEST FEATURES THAT YOU WOULD LIKE! I realize that the standard options aren't great, so I'm looking for suggestions to make the output more digestible. Would anyone be interested in scripts/options to produce graphic output (postscript, xplot, gnuplot, etc.)? Coming up: * The next major release will introduce utmpx support for those of you lucky enough to have it. It's good to know that people are willing to donate their time and effort to getting the GNU Accounting Utilities up and working on many machines. Thanks a lot for the help! -Noel Noel Cragg \\ 6244 Aberdeen Avenue \\ Goleta CA 93117-2002 \\ 805 964 1892 noel@cs.oberlin.edu \\ noel@red-bean.com \\ noel@gnu.ai.mit.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The GNU Accounting Utilities are Copyright (C) 1993, 1996, 1997, 2008, 2009, 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
