The praudit Command

The praudit command reads audit records in binary format from standard input and displays the records in a presentable format. The input can be piped from the auditreduce command or from a single audit file. Input can also be produced with the cat command to concatenate several files, or the tail command for a current audit file.

The praudit command can generate four output formats:

• Default – The default option displays one audit token per line. The default option displays the audit event by its description, such as ioctl(2), and displays any value that could be text in text format. For example, a user is displayed as the user name, not as the user ID.

• –l option – The long option displays one audit record per line. The -d option changes the delimiter used between token fields, and between tokens. The default delimiter is a comma.

• –r option – The raw option displays any value that could be numeric as a number. For example, a user is displayed by user ID, Internet addresses are in hexadecimal format, and modes are in octal format. The audit event is displayed as its event number, such as 158.

• –s option – The short option displays the audit event by its table name, for example, AUE_IOCTL. The option displays the other tokens as the default option displays them.

In the default output format of praudit, each record is easily identified as a sequence of audit tokens where each token is on a separate line. Each record begins with a header token. You could, for example, further process the output with the awk command.

Here is the default output from the praudit command for a header token:

header,240,1,ioctl(2),es,Tue Sept  7 16:11:44 1999, + 270 msec

Here is the output from the praudit -r command for the same header token:

20,240,1,158,0003,699754304, + 270 msec

Sometimes, you might want to manipulate output from the praudit command as lines of text. For example, you might want to select records that the auditreduce command cannot select. You can use a simple shell script to process the output of praudit. The following simple example script marks the header tokens by prefixing them with Control-A, combines all the audit tokens for one record onto one line while preserving the line breaks as Control-A, runs the grep command, and restores the original newline breaks.

#!/bin/sh
praudit | sed -e '1,2d' -e '$s/^file.*$//' -e 's/^header/^aheader/' \\
| tr '\\012\\001' '\\002\\012' \\
| grep "$1" \\
| tr '\\002' '\\012'

Note that the ^a in the script is Control-A, not the two characters ^ and a. The prefix distinguishes the header token from the string header that might appear as text.