auditctl rule to monitor dir only (not all sub dir and files etc..)

I am trying to use auditd to monitor changes to a directory. The problem is that when I setup a rule it does monitor the dir I specified but also all the sub dir and files making the monitor useless due to endless verbosity.

Here is the rule I setup:

|auditctl-w/home/raven/public_html-p war-k raven-pubhtmlwatch|

when I search the logs using

|ausearch-k raven-pubhtmlwatch|

I get thousands of lines of logs that list everything under public_html/

How can I limit the rule to changes on the directory specified only?

Thank you very much.

A watch is really a syscall rule in disguise. If you place a watch on a directory, auditctl will turn it into:

-a exit,always -F dir=/home/raven/public_html -F perm=war -F key=raven-pubhtmlwatch

The -F dir field is recursive. However, if you just want to watch the directory entries, you can change that to -F path.

-a exit,always -F path=/home/raven/public_html -F perm=war -F key=raven-pubhtmlwatch

This is not recursive and just watches the inode that the directory occupies.

-Steve

Thank you so much Steve!

Do you know how to set this up via "auditctl" ?

I was not able to find a way looking at:
[~]# auditctl -help

Otherwise where would I edit the rule? (it's not in the .rules file, but it is displayed if I auditctl -l)

Thank you so much
Stefano