命令sa -- summarizes accounting information

from "How to keep a detailed audit trail of what’s being done on your Linux systems"

by Vivek Gite ·

The psacct package contains several utilities for monitoring process activities, including ac, lastcomm, accton and sa.

• The ac command displays statistics about how long users have been logged on.
• The lastcomm command displays information about previous executed commands.
• The accton command turns process accounting on or off.
• The sa command summarizes information about previously executed commmands.

Task: summarizes accounting information

Use sa command to print summarizes information about previously executed commands. In addition, it condenses this data into a summary file named savacct which contains the number of times the command was called and the system resources used. The information can also be summarized on a per-user basis; sa will save this iinformation into a file named usracct.
# sa

Output:

     579     222.81re       0.16cp     7220k
       4       0.36re       0.12cp    31156k   up2date
       8       0.02re       0.02cp    16976k   rpmq
       8       0.01re       0.01cp     2148k   netstat
      11       0.04re       0.00cp     8463k   grep
      18     100.71re       0.00cp    11111k   ***other*
       8       0.00re       0.00cp    14500k   troff
       5      12.32re       0.00cp    10696k   smtpd
       2       8.46re       0.00cp    13510k   bash
       8       9.52re       0.00cp     1018k   less

Take example of first line:
4 0.36re 0.12cp 31156k up2date
Where,

• 0.36re "real time" in wall clock minutes
• 0.12cp sum of system and user time in cpu minutes
• 31156k cpu-time averaged core usage, in 1k units
• up2date command name

Display output per-user:
# sa -u

Output:

root       0.00 cpu      595k mem accton
root       0.00 cpu    12488k mem initlog
root       0.00 cpu    12488k mem initlog
root       0.00 cpu    12482k mem touch
root       0.00 cpu    13226k mem psacct
root       0.00 cpu      595k mem consoletype
root       0.00 cpu    13192k mem psacct           *
root       0.00 cpu    13226k mem psacct
root       0.00 cpu    12492k mem chkconfig
postfix    0.02 cpu    10696k mem smtpd
vivek      0.00 cpu    19328k mem userhelper
vivek      0.00 cpu    13018k mem id
vivek      0.00 cpu    13460k mem bash             *
lighttpd   0.00 cpu    48240k mem php              *

Display the number of processes and number of CPU minutes on a per-user basis
# sa -m

Output:

                                      667     231.96re       0.17cp     7471k
root                                  544      51.61re       0.16cp     7174k
vivek                                 103      17.43re       0.01cp     8228k
postfix                                18     162.92re       0.00cp     7529k
lighttpd                                2       0.00re       0.00cp    48536k