AUSYSCALL:

Section: System Administration Utilities (8)
Updated: Nov 2008
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NAME

ausyscall - a program that allows mapping syscall names and numbers

SYNOPSIS

ausyscall [arch] name | number | --dump | --exact

DESCRIPTION

ausyscall is a program that prints out the mapping from syscall name to number and reverse for the given arch. The arch can be anything returned by `uname -m`. If arch is not given, the program will take a guess based on the running image. You may give the syscall name or number and it will find the opposite. You can also dump the whole table with the --dump option. By default a syscall name lookup will be a substring match meaning that it will try to match all occurrences of the given name with syscalls. So giving a name of chown will match both fchown and chown as any other syscall with chown in its name. If this behavior is not desired, pass the --exact flag and it will do an exact string match.

This program can be used to verify syscall numbers on a biarch platform for rule optimization. For example, suppose you had an auditctl rule:

-a always, exit -S open -F exit=-EPERM -k fail-open

If you wanted to verify that both 32 and 64 bit programs would be audited, run "ausyscall i386 open" and then "ausyscall x86_64 open". Look at the returned numbers. If they are different, you will have to write two auditctl rules to get complete coverage.

-a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S open -F exit=-EPERM -k fail-open
-a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S open -F exit=-EPERM -k fail-open

For more information about a specific syscall, use the man program and pass the number 2 as an argument to make sure that you get the syscall information rather than a shell script program or glibc function call of the same name. For example, if you wanted to learn about the open syscall, type: man 2 open.

OPTIONS

--dump: Print all syscalls for the given arch
--exact: Instead of doing a partial word match, match the given syscall name exactly.

AUTHOR

Steve Grubb