Re: Service name capitalization in Nmap?

[Brandon Enright <bmenrigh () ucsd edu>]

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On Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:31:19 -0500 or thereabouts Kris Katterjohn
<katterjohn () gmail com> wrote:

...snip...
 
> I really dislike the capitalization in the output.

I got a sentence typed in reply when I said to myself: "I better read
Kris's response first."  The above is the *exact* sentence I typed :-)

I was one of those reviewers torn by the capitalization in the book.
When it comes to the console-output though lower-case is the One True
Way.

When people do 'grep' they don't want to have to remember the case or
specify '-i'.

When people stuff the results into a database they don't want to have
to use case-insensitive matching like 'ilike'.

When people sort the output the don't want to see 'Zebra' or 'ZEBRA'
before 'echo'.

Besides, nearly every 'unix' command that I can think of or try outputs
lower-case results.

I feel like certain output is "machine readable" and certain output is
"human readable.  The service name is 'machine readable'.  The version
is clearly 'human readable'.  English grammar only applies to prose and
documentation.

If the output of Nmap were "Nmap found a service listening on UDP port
53.  This service is generally registered as Named or DNS." then yeah,
I'd say we better capitalize.

One possible solution for the book would be for any place that you want
to used 'dns' instead of 'DNS' or 'tcp' instead of 'TCP' you could
'm o n o s p a c e' the font so that readers clearly feel like the
reason for the capitalization is because it is copied from real output.

I guess that's my $0.02 worth -- and then some!

Brandon

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