accounting

[William E. Davidsen Jr]

  You have gotten a few good replies, but I will add a few more points.
The accounting fields on some systems store a pseudo float number as
described by another poster. As mentioned these can be in seconds or
ticks.

  On Ultrix the values are stored as floats rather than shorts. I don't
know if that's typical of BSD, since Sun uses shorts, also. The least
portable value is the memory. In addition to several formats, the values
may be in K-sec (core product) or K-cpu (increment the could by the K
every time the process is charged for a cpu cycle) or K-clock (I think
this is done by bumping the count every time the process is dispatched).
Just to keep from being portable, some keep the mem in K and others in
bytes!

  I learned a lot more than I wanted to know when I wrote a functional
acctcom clone for a unix-pc. Since then I have ported it to Xenix 286
and 386 (not remotely the same), and looked at Suns. When it reaches
another steady state I will send it off to sources.unix, although the
backlog must be fierce, as I sent my keyword index to text program off
to them several months ago.

  The original poster should let us know if it's a BSD or SysV system,
since some of the fields are very diferent.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me