Re: Quoting/escaping of command line in XML

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 08:47:02AM -0800, David Fifield wrote:
> XML output has an nmaprun@args attribute that is meant to allow you to
> recover the command line:
>
> $ ./nmap -sn -oX - --no-stylesheet
> <?xml version="1.0"?>
> <!-- Nmap 5.35DC18 scan initiated Thu Nov 11 08:30:57 2010 as: ./nmap -sn -oX - -&#45;no-stylesheet -->
> <nmaprun scanner="nmap" args="./nmap -sn -oX - -&#45;no-stylesheet">
>
> It has a problem, which is that it loses information when any of the
> arguments contains a space:
>
> $ ./nmap -sn -oX - --no-stylesheet --script-args 'msg=one two'
> <?xml version="1.0"?>
> <!-- Nmap 5.35DC18 scan initiated Thu Nov 11 08:33:50 2010 as: ./nmap -sn -oX - -&#45;no-stylesheet -&#45;script-args 
> msg=one two -->
> <nmaprun scanner="nmap" args="./nmap -sn -oX - -&#45;no-stylesheet -&#45;script-args msg=one two"
>
> NSE sees the proper argument msg="one two", but if you try to recover
> the command line, it looks like an argument msg="one" running against
> the target "two". Fyodor also noticed this:
>
> C:\> "C:\Program Files (x86)\Nmap\nmap.exe" -sn -oX - --no-stylesheet
> <?xml version="1.0"?>
> <!-- Nmap 5.35DC18 scan initiated Thu Nov 11 08:36:13 2010 as: C:\Program Files (x86)\Nmap\nmap.exe -sn -oX - -->
> <nmaprun scanner="nmap" args="C:\Program Files (x86)\Nmap\nmap.exe -sn -oX -">
>
> Here it looks like "C:\Program" is the executable name and "Files" and
> "(x86)\Nmap\nmap.exe" are targets.
>
> I attach a patch that quotes spaces in this string. It also escapes '"'
> and '\' because of the added quoting. This is only to enable the
> recovery of the arguments array (i.e., what you would pass to execv). It
> doesn't look for shell metacharacters or anything like that, so you
> can't just copy and paste from the XML to your shell. (Although this
> patch makes copying easier than it was before.) I'm writing to ask for
> comments and to alert anyone using this part of XML output.

It's committed in r21030.

David Fifield
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