[Aide] File type attribute

[Bob Proulx]

Pete J. O'Hara wrote:
> I am a newb and have searched around and it seems that AIDE doesn't 
> distinguish the file "type" attribute. In the manual "The Aide database 
> stores various file attributes including: permissions, inode number, 
> user, group, file size, mtime and ctime, atime, growing size and number 
> of links." Am I wrong in thing that file "type" isn't recognized?

In UNIX there is no such thing as file type.  Because it does not
exist you can't recognize it.  Files are nothing more than a sequence
of bytes.  The purpose those sequences of bytes are put to is up to
the reader of the file.

The closest you can get is to look at the file mode/permissions and
see if the execute bit is set on the file or not or if the file is a
directory, pipe, socket, block device node or a character device node.
That is as close to a file type that you can get.  All of the file
attributes that are available for the file are also available in aide
to check.

Bob