Get results from previous run

[hmoffatt]

Is there a way to get the nice formatted results as shown at the end of a run, from a previous run?

The log file and the report file seem to be machine rather than human readable.

[mboelen]

Yes, Lynis is intended to show readable output on the screen, debug information in the log, and machine-parsable information in the report file.

Now the definition of "nice" and "formatted" differs between people. So let's assume something that you can quickly see the differences between the scan of yesterday of today. What you can do is create a diff between two Lynis scans:
diff -y /var/log/lynis-report-previous.dat /var/log/lynis-report.dat | grep -v "report_datetime"

See the link on how to create this into a script if you want to automate things.

Does this help?

[hmoffatt]

Thanks, that's a useful suggestion about comparing results.

I would find it useful to have a switch to write the readable output to file (HTML perhaps to preserve the colors and links), though I see I can redirect it to file (with --no-colors to suppress the escape sequences), which is close enough.

[mboelen]

There are tools available that can convert terminal output to HTML directly. For example the tool terminal-to-html.

As a bonus: you can then store both the raw screen output and perform a diff. And even that diff you could convert to HTML. In other words, enough possibilities.

[hmoffatt]

Thanks, I didn't know of such tools.