Installation guide

Accounting files can become corrupted or lost. The files that are used to
produce daily or monthly reports, such as the /var/adm/wtmp and
/var/adm/acct/sum/tacct accounting database files, must have
complete integrity. If these files are corrupted or lost, you can recover them
from backups. In addition, you can use the fwtmp or the wtmpfix
command to correct the /var/adm/wtmp file. Refer to Section 12.4.2 and
Section 12.4.1 for more information. You can use the acctmerg command
to fix errors in the /var/adm/acct/sum/tacct file. Refer to
Section 12.9.2 for more information.
The /var/adm/acct/nite directory contains files that are reused daily by
the runacct script. Some of these files have binary counterparts in the
/var/adm/acct/sum directory, which contains the cumulative summary
files that are updated by the runacct shell script and used by the
monacct shell script to produce monthly reports.
Table 12–2 to Table 12–5 list the accounting files. The Name column
specifies the file name and the table title specifies the directory pathname
for the files. The Type column tells you if the file is an ASCII file or a
binary file. The Description column provides a description of the file.
Table 12–2: Database Files in the /var/adm Directory
Name Type Description
dtmp
ASCII Contains temporary output produced by the
dodisk shell script.
fee
ASCII Contains output from the chargefee shell
script.
pacct
Binary Specifies the active process accounting database
file. If a process is called by a user, another
process, or a script file, process information is
written to this file.
pacct
n Binary Specifies the alternate pacct file created by the
turnacct switch command. The pacct
database file becomes large quickly if a system
has many users. A single pacct file is limited to
500 1024-block disk spaces. The size of these
files is monitored by the runacct shell script.
Each time a new pacct
n file is created, the
value
n is incremented by one.
qacct
Binary Contains queueing (printer) system accounting
records. This file is used by the runacct shell
script.
savacct
Binary Specifies the file used by the sa command to
store system process accounting summary
records.
Administering the System Accounting Services 12–5