Security & Threat Intelligence · 12.08.2026, 15:40 UTC
Linux Kernel Process Accounting, (Wed, Aug 12th)
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Security & Threat Intelligence |
| Quelle | SANS Internet Storm Center ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 12.08.2026 UTC |
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A couple of days ago, Xavier posted about Atuin to gain more insight into the command history. Atuin does a great job of better organizing what is usually handled by "bash_history" and collecting meaningful additional data. Our reader David commented that this can also be done quite well with Linux's kernel process accounting feature, and I think he is very right. I really like Linux process accounting for a number of reasons, so here is a quick introduction.
Process accounting is a kernel feature. You will not see a specific process responsible for it. Instead, the "accton" command signals the kernel to start logging process data to a specific location (usually /var/log/account/pacct). Once a process terminates, the kernel will log respective details to the binary log file.
1 - Installation
I don't think process accounting is enabled by default on any Linux system. It does add a little additional overhead, but some users may shy away from it because it requires additional disk writes to collect the information. Memory and other CPUs should not be significantly impacted by process accounting. On my not very busy Proxmox system, it uses about 50 MB/day of disk space. So nothing that should be noticeable for most systems.
Installation usually comes down to installing the respective package for your distribution. On Debian based distributions, it is just
apt install acct
This will typically also configure the startup scripts, but it can't hurt to run
systemctl enable --now acct
That is it. Wait a little bit, and you will see the log.
2 - How to read the logs
Logs …