SUMMARY: RESEND: monitor /var/adm/pacct continuosly w/ acctcom

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I'd like to thank the following individuals for their responses:

djast@cs.toronto.edu
ModregoK@bancsabadell.com
nick.hindley@lbhf.gov.uk
FrederiP@ritchie.disa.mil

This was nick.hindley@lbhf.gov.uk reply:

"There is a perl module, file_tail which may give you the functionality you
want for dealing with files that are truncated/moved renamed."

I downloaded and installed File::Tail.  It works well w/ standard
ASCII/Text-based files, but when feeding it to an app such as
acctcom it doesn't function properly because it (acctom) receives its records
(data) from stdin instead of opening /var/adm/pacct.  File::Tail doesn't
have the capabilites to take the last <n> of characters, only lines.

djast@cs.toronto.edu hit the nail square dab on its head:

"That's because it's "tail -f" that's waiting for more input, not
acctcom.  Just because "tail" is waiting for more input doesn't
magically make acctcom produce more output.  "You can't push a rope."

Do things the other way around: use "tail -f" to continuously follow
/var/adm/pacct and feed it to acctcom:

    tail -40cf /var/adm/pacct | acctcom

Note that you need to make sure that "tail"'s output doesn't start in
the middle of an accounting record.  Hence the "40c" to take the last 40
characters (one record) from the file--note that the number 40 for the
record size is not guaranteed to be portable between releases of the
operating system.  You could also do something like "-9999f" to make
tail send the entire file to acctcom.

(Acctcom automatically notices that its input isn't a terminal, and
receives its accounting records from stdin instead of opening
/var/adm/pacct.)"

Now, the only problem is, when /var/adm/pacct recycles tail is
oblivious to it, but I can live w/ it.  I'll just have to restart the cmd
once the file has reached its end.

But, I do recommend File::Tail for ASCII/Text files, especially for
files such as /var/log/syslog, which recycles itself as well as
/var/adm/messages.

Thanks to everyone mentioned above that took the time to respond.

- Wally Winzer Jr.


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