lastcomm(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | FILES | AUTHOR | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

LASTCOMM(1)              General Commands Manual              LASTCOMM(1)

NAME         top

       lastcomm -  print out information about previously executed
       commands.

SYNOPSIS         top

       lastcomm
              [ command-name ...  ]
              [ user-name ...  ]
              [ terminal-name ...  ]
              [ OPTION ... ]

DESCRIPTION         top

       lastcomm  prints  out  information  about previously executed com‐
       mands.  If no arguments are specified, lastcomm  will  print  info
       about  all  of  the commands in acct (the record file).  If called
       with one or more of command-name, user-name, or terminal-name, on‐
       ly records containing those items will be displayed.  For example,
       to find out which users used command `a.out' and which users  were
       logged into `tty0', type:
                              lastcomm a.out tty0

       This  will  print any entry for which `a.out' or `tty0' matches in
       any of the record's fields (command, name, or terminal).   If  you
       want  to  find only items that match *all* of the arguments on the
       command line, you must use the '-strict-match' option.  For  exam‐
       ple,  to  list all of the executions of command a.out by user root
       on terminal tty0, type:
         lastcomm --strict-match --command a.out --user root --tty tty0

       The order of the arguments is not important.

       For each entry the following information is printed:
          + command name of the process
          + flags, as recorded by the system accounting routines:
               S -- command executed by super-user
               F -- command executed after a fork but without a following
       exec
               C -- command run in PDP-11 compatibility mode (VAX only)
               D -- command terminated with the generation of a core file
               X -- command was terminated with the signal SIGTERM
          + the name of the user who ran the process
          + time the process started

OPTIONS         top

       --strict-match
              Print only entries that match *all* of the arguments on the
              command line.
       --print-controls
              Print control characters.
       --user name
              List records for user with name.  This is useful if you're
              trying to match a username that happens to be the same as a
              command (e.g., ed ).
       --command name
              List records for command name.
       --tty name
              List records for tty name.
       --forwards
              Read file forwards instead of backwards. This avoids trying
              to seek on the file and can be used to read from a pipe.
              This must be specified prior to any -f arguments.
       -f filename, --file filename
              Read from the file filename instead of acct.  A filename of
              "-" will result in reading from stdin. This must either be
              the first -f option, or --forwards must precede all -f op‐
              tions.
       --ahz hz
              Use this flag to tell the program what AHZ should be (in
              hertz).  This option is useful if you are trying to view an
              acct file created on another machine which has the same
              byte order and file format as your current machine, but has
              a different value for AHZ.
       -p, --show-paging
              Print paging statistics.
       --pid  Show PID and PPID of the process if acct version 3 format
              is supported by kernel.
       --pid  Add pid of the process and pid of the process parent to the
              output (pid is the last but one and parent pid the last
              column).  These values are shown only when they are gener‐
              ated by acct function (depends on the version of kernel)
       --debug
              Print verbose internal information.
       -V, --version
              Print the version number of lastcomm.
       -h, --help
              Prints the usage string and default locations of system
              files to standard output and exits.

FILES         top

       acct
              The system wide process accounting file. See acct(5) (or
              pacct(5)) for further details.  /var/log/account
                     This directory contains pacct files which contain
                     the binary process accounting data as written by the
                     kernel.

AUTHOR         top

       The GNU accounting utilities were written by Noel Cragg
       <noel@gnu.ai.mit.edu>. The man page was adapted from the account‐
       ing texinfo page by Susan Kleinmann <sgk@sgk.tiac.net>.

SEE ALSO         top

       last(1), acct(5)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the psacct (process accounting utilities)
       project.  Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/acct/⟩.  If you have a bug report for
       this manual page, see ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/acct/⟩.  This
       page was obtained from the tarball acct-6.6.4.tar.gz fetched from
       ⟨http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/acct/⟩ on 2025-02-02.  If you discover any
       rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
       or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
       mail to man-pages@man7.org

                             1995 October 31                  LASTCOMM(1)

Pages that refer to this page: acct(5)dump-acct(8)dump-utmp(8)