nmap options

[Jonathan Scott Duff <duff () cbi tamucc edu>]

Why do -o and -m accept filenames?  What's wrong with making -m output
the "machine readable" form to stdout and let the user use the
redirection of the shell?  It also seems odd to me that when I use
either of these options not only does the output go to a file, but it
goes to stdout as well in the human readable form only.

It would seem more natural for nmap to write output to stdout in human
readable form by default, in machine readable if -m is specified, and
write output to a file (only) if -o is specified.  (ie. "nmap -o file
-m host" would write output to file in machine readable form, and
"nmap -o file host" would write output to file in human readable form,
and neither would output anything to stdout)

While I'm giving my cents worth, it would be an improvement in the
machine readable format if there were no "headers" with spaces in
them (like "Seq Index" for instance).  Or perhaps better, if each
item were separated by a tab character instead of space.  Like,
"\tHost: 127.0.0.1 (a.b.c.d)\tPorts: none\tSeq Index: 1\tOS: unknown",
etc.

MHOs,

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff () cbi tamucc edu