LinuxSecurity.com: Dominik George discovered that logwatch did not properly sanitizelog file names that were passed to the shell as part of a command.If a remote attacker were able to generate specially crafted filenames(for example, via Samba logging), they could execute arbitrary codewith root privileges. [More...]
LOGWATCH(8) User Manuals LOGWATCH(8)NAME
logwatch - system log analyzer and reporter
SYNOPSIS
logwatch [--detail level ] [--logfile log-file-group ] [--service service-name ] [--mailto address ] [--archives] [--range range ] [--debug
level ] [--filename file-name ] [--logdir directory ] [--hostlimit hosts ] [--hostname hostname ] [--html_wrap number of characters ]
[--hostformat host based options ] [--output output-type ] [--format report format ] [--encode encoding to use ] [--numeric] [--no-old-
files-log] [--version] [--help|--usage]
DESCRIPTION
Logwatch is a customizable, pluggable log-monitoring system. It will go through your logs for a given period of time and make a report in
the areas that you wish with the detail that you wish. Logwatch is being used for Linux and many types of UNIX.
OPTIONS --detail level
This is the detail level of the report. level can be a positive integer, or high, med, low, which correspond to the integers 10, 5,
and 0, respectively.
--logfile log-file-group
This will force Logwatch to process only the set of logfiles defined by log-file-group (i.e. messages, xferlog, ...). Logwatch will
therefore process all services that use those logfiles. This option can be specified more than once to specify multiple logfile-
groups.
--service service-name
This will force Logwatch to process only the service specified in service-name (i.e. login, pam, identd, ...). Logwatch will there-
fore also process any log-file-groups necessary to process these services. This option can be specified more than once to specify
multiple services to process. A useful service-name is All which will process all services (and logfile-groups) for which you have
filters installed.
--mailto address
Mail the results to the email address or user specified in address.
--range range
You can specify a date-range to process. Common ranges are Yesterday, Today, All, and Help. Additional options are listed when
invoked with the Help parameter.
--archives
Each log-file-group has basic logfiles (i.e. /var/log/messages) as well as archives (i.e. /var/log/messages.? or /var/log/mes-
sages.?.gz). When used with "--range all", this option will make Logwatch search through the archives in addition to the regular
logfiles. For other values of --range, Logwatch will search the appropriate archived logs.
--debug level
For debugging purposes. level can range from 0 to 100. This will really clutter up your output. You probably don't want to use
this.
--filename file-name
Save the output to file-name instead of displaying or mailing it.
--logdir directory
Look in directory for log subdirectories or log files instead of the default directory.
--hostlimit host1,host2
Limit report to hostname - host1, host2.
--hostname hostname
Use hostname for the reports instead of this system's hostname. In addition, if HostLimit is set in the logwatch.conf configuration
file (see MORE INFORMATION, below), then only logs from this hostname will be processed (where appropriate).
--html_wrap num-characters
Number of characters that html output should be wrapped to. Default is 80.
--numeric
Inhibits additional name lookups, displaying IP addresses numerically.
--no-oldfiles-log
Suppress the logwatch log, which informs about the old files in logwatch tmpdir.
--usage
Displays usage information
--help same as --usage.
FILES
/usr/share/logwatch/
This directory contains all the perl executables and configuration files shipped with the logwatch distribution.
/etc/logwatch
This directory contains local configuration files that override the default configuration. See MORE INFORMATION below for more
information.
EXAMPLES
logwatch --service ftpd-xferlog --range all --detail high --archives
This will print out all FTP transfers that are stored in all current and archived xferlogs.
logwatch --service pam_pwdb --range yesterday --detail high
This will print out login information for the previous day...
MORE INFORMATION
The directory /usr/share/doc/logwatch-* contains several files with additional documentation:
HOWTO-Customize-LogWatch
Documents the directory structure of Logwatch configuration and executable files, and describes how to customize Logwatch by over-
riding these default files.
LICENSE
Describes the License under which Logwatch is distributed. Additional clauses may be specified in individual files.
README
Describes how to install, where to find it, mailing lists, and other useful information.
AUTHOR
Kirk Bauer <kirk@kaybee.org>
http://www.kaybee.org/~kirk
ftp://ftp.kaybee.org/pub/redhat/RPMS
Linux October 2005 LOGWATCH(8)