DOKK / manpages / debian 13 / aide / aide.1.en
AIDE(1) User Commands AIDE(1)

aide - Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment

aide [parameters] command

AIDE is an intrusion detection system for checking the integrity of files.

Checks the database for inconsistencies. You must have an initialized database to do this. This is also the default command. Without any command aide does a check.
Initialize the database. You must initialize a database and move it to the appropriate place (see database_in config option) before you can use the --check command.
Traverse the file system, match each file against the rule tree and report to stdout.

Neither reports nor the database are written in this mode.

To change the log level in this mode please use the --log-level command line parameter.

In this mode aide exits with status 0.

Checks the database and updates the database non-interactively. The input and output databases must be different.
Compares two databases. They must be defined in config file with database=<url> and database_new=<url>.
List the entries of the database in human readable format (analogous to the detailed report output of new files). Note that the checksums are base16 encoded.
Stops after reading in the configuration file. Any errors will be reported. To change the log level in this mode please use the --log-level command line parameter.
Read configuration and match provided file_type, optionally file system type (added in AIDE v0.19, Linux only) and path against rule tree.

The path is independent of what is in the actual file system and needs to be absolute. See RESTRICTED RULES section in aide.conf (5) for supported file types and file system types.

Please note that the specified file system type is only applied to the file and not to the parent directories of the path. If a restricted rule cannot be matched against a parent directory due to the missing file system type aide raises a warning.

To change the log level in this mode please use the --log-level command line parameter.

In this mode aide exits with status 0 if the file would be added to the tree, 1 if not and 2 if the file does not match the specified limit.

Configuration is read from file configfile (see --version output for default value). Use '-' for stdin.
Limit command to entries matching REGEX. Note that the REGEX only matches at the first position.

Example
Only check and update the database entries matching /etc (i.e. the /etc directory) while leaving all other entries unchecked and unchanged: 

aide --update --limit /etc

These configparameters are handled before the reading of the configuration file. See aide.conf (5) for more details on what to put here.
These configparameters are handled after the reading of the configuration file. See aide.conf (5) for more details on what to put here.
The log level to use (see aide.conf (5) for available log levels and more details). This overwrites the log_level value set in any configuration file.
Removed, use log_level and report_level config options instead (see aide.conf (5) for details).
Removed, use report_url config option instead (see aide.conf (5) for details).
Specifies the number of workers (see aide.conf (5) for details). This overwrites the num_workers value set in any configuration file.
Turn progress off explicitly. By default progress is shown if standard error is connected to a terminal.
Turn colored log output off explicitly. By default colored log output is enabled if standard error is connected to a terminal.
Print version information and exit.
Prints out the standard help message.

Normally, the exit status is 0 if no errors occurred. Except when the --check, --compare or --update command was requested, in which case the exit status is defined as:

1 * (new files reported?) +
2 * (removed files reported?) +
4 * (changed files reported?)

Since those three cases can occur together, the respective error codes are added. For example, if there are new files and removed files reported, the exit status will be 1 + 2 = 3.

Additionally, the following exit codes are defined for generic error conditions:

14 Writing error
15 Invalid argument error
16 Unimplemented function error
17 Configuration error
18 IO error
19 Version mismatch error
20 EXEC error
21 File lock error
22 Memory allocation error
23 Thread error
24 Database error
25 received SIGINT, SIGTERM or SIGHUP

Remove an incompletely written database (only if database file was created by aide) and exit (code 25).

Toggle the log_level between current and debug level.

SIGUSR1 is only handled after config parsing.

Resize the progress bar (if enabled).

The checksums in the database and in the output are by default base64 encoded (see also report_base16 option). To decode them you can use the following shell command:

echo <encoded_checksum> | base64 -d | hexdump -v -e '32/1 "%02x" "\n"'

Control characters (00-31 and 127) are always escaped in log and plain report output. They are escaped by a literal backslash (\) followed by exactly 3 digits representing the character in octal notation (e.g. a newline is output as "\012"). A literal backslash is not escaped unless it is followed by 3 digits (0-9), in this case the literal backslash is escaped as "\134". Reports in JSON format are escaped according to the JSON specs (e.g. a newline is output as "\b" or an escape (ESC) is output as "\u001b")

See --version output for the default config file and the default database_in and database_out config values.

aide.conf(5)

There are probably bugs in this release. Please report them at https://github.com/aide/aide/issues .

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2025-07-06 aide v0.19.1