This is a long, and somewhat belated, response. Please read through it and give me your comments.
Marek Michalkiewicz writes: Marek> I noticed the following problems with the acct-alpha-5-7 package: Marek> Marek> - lastcomm and the kernel seem to disagree about sizeof(struct acct) Marek> (only every 13th line displayed looks like a valid one). After the Marek> (somewhat garbled) data from the accounting file, lastcomm displays Marek> several hundred lines of garbage, and finally gets a SEGV. I cannot reproduce the SEGV behaviour. But I remember that my machine behaved similarly at some point in time. This might be due to the fact that there is some old information in your /var/account/pacct file. Please set this file to zero, start accounting, execute some commands and try again. Output from `last' is not well formatted, a better `last' exists. See below. Marek> - /etc/init.d/acct prints the usage message when invoked correctly Marek> (with "start" or "stop" as the first argument), and doesn't start or Marek> stop accounting (but running accton by hand works as expected). It Marek> works after commenting out the ". /etc/init.d/functions" line (which Marek> is not necessary here anyway), so I guess maybe something is screwed Marek> up in this file (part of sysvinit). Thanks, I will suppress sourcing of /etc/init.f/functions in the next release. Marek> - trying to start accounting again when it is already running gives Marek> a message "Process accounting not available on this system", which Marek> is a bit confusing (I suggest not to redirect stderr from accton to Marek> /dev/null, so that one can see what is really the problem). Please see acct(2). There is not a lot we can do about it as the acct() functions returns either 0 or -1. You get -1 for missing accounting support in the kernel, but also when accounting is already turned on. All I could do is to change the wording of the message to Process accounting not available or already running. but this could irritate new users considerably. The REAL problem with acct-alpha is that it doesn't really match the current kernel. acct-alpha stems from a package that was released in 1993 with url ftp://alpha.gnu.ai.mit.edu:/gnu/acct-alpha-5.tar.gz. It provides ac report on connect time from `wtmp' accton turn on process accounting last list logins on system lastcomm prints information about previously executed commands sa summarizes info about previously executed commands but 'sa' can't compile under the current kernel (some struct members missing in a kernel header file). 'ac' feels buggy (creates output for dates not included in the wtmp file) and `lastcomm' output is not properly formatted. ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/Admin/accounts/acct-1.2.0.tar.gz provides accton turn on process accounting accttrim trim down size of an account file lastcomm show last command executed in reverse order The programs work fine, and they have man pages. I could package acct-1.2.0 instead of acct-alpha and continue to package `last' as a single package for the base section. I already wrote a man page for `last'. We would lose ac, which doesn't work well right now, and sa, which doesn't work at all. But we would gain a proper, current `acct' package. Please comment. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/~edd