How to stop pacct daemon/service and stop its loggging in Linux ?

Today in this post, we will look at an interesting article how to stop the pacct service in Linux.

1. Verify if pacct service is disabled on system.

### The default everyone uses to check services is to use "pf -ef" command.
### However it will not be visible here as this is process accounting not a separate process.
[root@ngelinux001 ~]# ps -ef | grep -i acct
root      83785  83688  0 22:59 pts/287  00:00:00 grep -i acctas

### Better to check chkconfig and make sure its off everywhere.
[root@ngelinux001 ~]# chkconfig --list | grep -i acct
psacct         	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:off	4:off	5:off	6:off
[root@ngelinux001 ~]# 

2. Check out the binary and log path path of the service.

[saketj@ngelinux001 ~]$ cat /etc/logrotate.d/psacct
# Logrotate file for psacct RPM
 
/var/account/pacct {
#prerotate loses accounting records, let's no
#   prerotate
#       /usr/sbin/accton
#   endscript
    compress
    #delaycompress
    notifempty
    daily
    rotate 3
    #rotate 31
    create 0600 root root
    postrotate
       /usr/sbin/accton /var/account/pacct
    endscript
}     
[saketj@ngelinux001 ~]$ file /usr/sbin/accton
/usr/sbin/accton: symbolic link to `../../sbin/accton'

3. Check if the process is running on not.
To check this, we need to check last modificaiton time of the log file.
If its not updating now, means its stopped.

[root@ngelinux001 ~]# ls -l /var/account/pacct
-rw------- 1 root root 43410624 May 29 23:02 /var/account/pacct
[root@ngelinux001 ~]# date
Sun May 29 23:02:33 PDT 2022

4. The process seems running as of now.
Stop the process accounting daemon.

[root@ngelinux001 ~]# /usr/sbin/accton

#### Running command without any argument just stops it on the server.

5. Check the size after some time, if it remains same now, it means the daemon is stopped.

[root@ngelinux001 ~]# ls -l /var/account/pacct
-rw------- 1 root root 43417408 May 29 23:03 /var/account/pacct
[root@ngelinux001 ~]# date
Sun May 29 23:03:16 PDT 2022

root@ngelinux001 ~]# date
Sun May 29 23:05:42 PDT 2022
[root@ngelinux001 ~]# ls -l /var/account/pacct
-rw------- 1 root root 43417408 May 29 23:03 /var/account/pacct
[root@ngelinux001 ~]# 

Since now the size is same and is not increasing, it means the daemon is stopped.

Tags: accountacctcentoscommanddaemonlinuxmonitoringpacctprocesspsredhatservicesizestopunix