AUREPORT(8)

📦
version 4.2.1 · 3 versions
, in arch rolling, centos-stream 10, fedora 43, fedora 44, nixpkgs unstable

💖 AUREPORT — the manual, but make it cute 💖

okay bestie, welcome to aureport from the System Administration Utilities collection ✨ this is the girl who reads your audit logs so you don't have to, and she eats every single time 💅

🌸 NAME 🌸

aureport — a tool that produces summary reports of audit daemon logs 🫶

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

aureport [options]

that's it. that's the whole vibe. options go in, pretty little reports come out 🎀

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so, aureport is a tool that produces summary reports of the audit system logs. she's literally the queen of turning chaos into a cute lil table 📊

she can also take input from stdin as long as the input is the raw log data. yes bestie, you can just pipe it in, she's flexible like that 💁

every report has a column label at the top to help with interpretation of the various fields — so you're never sitting there like "what is this number 😭". and except for the main summary report, all reports have the audit event number. you can subsequently lookup the full event with ausearch -a event number. iykyk 👑

heads up: you may need to specify start & stop times if you get multiple hits. don't come for me when you get 12 results, that's on the data 💀

the reports produced by aureport can be used as building blocks for more complicated analysis. she's not just a report, she's a whole foundation. main character energy fr fr 🌈

💅 OPTIONS 💅

forty-ish options and every single one is iconic. let's go, no skipping, we don't do that here ✨

  • -au, --auth — report about authentication attempts 🔐
  • -a, --avc — report about avc messages
  • --comm — report about commands run
  • -c, --config — report about config changes
  • -cr, --crypto — report about crypto events
  • --debug — write malformed events that are skipped to stderr. like, the messy ones get exiled to the error stream 🙈
  • --delete — when used with configuration, integrity, or MAC reports, only include delete or remove operations
  • --eoe-timeout seconds — set the end of event parsing timeout. see end_of_event_timeout in auditd.conf(5) for details. note that setting this value will override any configured value found in /etc/auditd/auditd.conf. so like, this option is louder than the config file, periodt 📢
  • -e, --event — report about events
  • --add — when used with configuration, integrity, or MAC reports, only include add or create operations
  • --escape option — this option determines if the output is escaped to make the content safer for certain uses. the options are raw , tty , shell , and shell_quote. each mode includes the characters of the preceding mode and escapes more characters. that is to say shell includes all characters escaped by tty and adds more. tty is the default. so it's giving escalation but make it escaping 🪜
  • -f, --file — report about files and af_unix sockets 🗂️
  • --failed — only select failed events for processing in the reports. the default is both success and failed events. so by default she's non-judgemental, but you CAN be judgy if you want 😌
  • -h, --host — report about hosts
  • --help — print brief command summary
  • -i, --interpret — interpret numeric entities into text. for example, uid is converted to account name. the conversion is done using the current resources of the machine where the search is being run. if you have renamed the accounts, or don't have the same accounts on your machine, you could get misleading results. ⚠️ so like, cute feature, but it trusts your machine's current lore, ok?
  • -if, --input file | directory — use the given file or directory instead of the logs. this is to aid analysis where the logs have been moved to another machine or only part of a log was saved. the path length is limited to 4064 bytes 📏
  • --input-logs — use the log file location from auditd.conf as input for analysis. this is needed if you are using aureport from a cron job. cron besties, this one's for you 🫶
  • --integrity — report about integrity events
  • -k, --key — report about audit rule keys 🔑
  • -l, --login — report about logins
  • -m, --mods — report about account modifications
  • -ma, --mac — report about Mandatory Access Control (MAC) events
  • -n, --anomaly — report about anomaly events. these events include NIC going into promiscuous mode and programs segfaulting. red flag city 🚩
  • --node node-name — only select events originating from node name string for processing in the reports. the default is to include all nodes. multiple nodes are allowed 👯
  • -nc, --no-config — do not include the CONFIG_CHANGE event. this is particularly useful for the key report because audit rules have key labels in many cases. using this option gets rid of these false positives. thank u for clearing my feed 🧹
  • -p, --pid — report about processes
  • -r, --response — report about responses to anomaly events
  • -s, --syscall — report about syscalls
  • --success — only select successful events for processing in the reports. the default is both success and failed events. ✨
  • --summary — run the summary report that gives a total of the elements of the main report. not all reports have a summary. so, y'know, temper your expectations bestie 🥲
  • -t, --log — this option will output a report of the start and end times for each log ⏰
  • --tty — report about tty keystrokes
  • -te, --end [end-date] [end-time] — search for events with time stamps equal to or before the given end time. the format of end time depends on your locale. if the date is omitted, today is assumed. if the time is omitted, now is assumed. use 24 hour clock time rather than AM or PM to specify time. an example date using the en_US.utf8 locale is 09/03/2009. an example of time is 18:00:00. the date format accepted is influenced by the LC_TIME environmental variable.

you may also use the word: now, recent, this-hour, boot, today, yesterday, this-week, week-ago, this-month, this-year. now means starting now. recent is 10 minutes ago. boot means the time of day to the second when the system last booted. today means now. yesterday is 1 second after midnight the previous day. this-week means starting 1 second after midnight on day 0 of the week determined by your locale (see localtime). week-ago means 1 second after midnight exactly 7 days ago. this-month means 1 second after midnight on day 1 of the month. this-year means the 1 second after midnight on the first day of the first month. 🗓️

  • -tm, --terminal — report about terminals
  • -ts, --start [start-date] [start-time] — search for events with time stamps equal to or after the given end time. the format of end time depends on your locale. if the date is omitted, today is assumed. if the time is omitted, midnight is assumed. use 24 hour clock time rather than AM or PM to specify time. an example date using the en_US.utf8 locale is 09/03/2009. an example of time is 18:00:00. the date format accepted is influenced by the LC_TIME environmental variable.

you may also use the word: now, recent, this-hour, boot, today, yesterday, this-week, week-ago, this-month, this-year. boot means the time of day to the second when the system last booted. today means starting at 1 second after midnight. recent is 10 minutes ago. yesterday is 1 second after midnight the previous day. this-week means starting 1 second after midnight on day 0 of the week determined by your locale (see localtime). week-ago means starting 1 second after midnight exactly 7 days ago. this-month means 1 second after midnight on day 1 of the month. this-year means the 1 second after midnight on the first day of the first month. 🌅

  • -u, --user — report about users
  • -v, --version — print the version and exit
  • --virt — report about Virtualization events
  • -x, --executable — report about executables

🎀 NOTE 🎀

okay so the boot time option is a convenience function and has limitations. the time it calculates is based on time now minus /proc/uptime. if after boot the system clock has been adjusted, perhaps by ntp, then the calculation may be wrong. 😭 in that case you'll need to fully specify the time.

you can check the time it would use by running:

date -d "`cut -f1 -d. /proc/uptime` seconds ago"

like, it's doing math and sometimes the math is lying to you. vibe check your clock bestie 🕰️

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

ausearch(8), auditd(8), auditd.conf(5).

go read those too, they're the supporting cast and they ate 💜

Red Hat · March 2026 — mwah, that's a wrap from your favorite audit-reporting icon 👑✨ bye bestie, go check your logs 🦋💖

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