AC(8) System Manager's Manual AC(8)

acconnect time accounting

ac [-dp] [-t tty] [-w wtmp] [users ...]

By default, a record of individual login and logout times are recorded by login(1) and init(8), respectively to syslogd(8). The ac utility examines these records and writes the accumulated connect time (in hours) for all logins to the standard output.

The options are as follows:

Display the connect times in 24 hour chunks.
Print individual users' totals.
tty
Only do accounting logins on certain ttys. The tty specification can start with '!' to indicate not this tty and end with '*' to indicate all similarly named ttys. Multiple -t flags may be specified.
wtmp
Read connect time data from wtmp instead of the default, reading from the log(1).
users ...
Display totals for the given individuals only.

If no arguments are given, ac displays the total connect time for all accounts with login sessions recorded in log(1).

/var/run/utmpx
connect time accounting file

The ac utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

Allow times recorded in modems to be charged out at a different rate than other:

ac -p -t "ttyd*" > modems
ac -p -t "!ttyd*" > other

log(1), login(1), getutxent(3), utmpx(5), launchd(8), sa(8), syslogd(8)

An ac command appeared in Version 5 AT&T UNIX. This version of ac was written for NetBSD 0.9A from the specification provided by various systems' manual pages.

February 14, 2020 Mac OS X 12