Re: Nmap tty and NSE

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 11:36:23PM -0700, Patrick Donnelly wrote:
> When speaking to Ron and Brandon about some of the problems debugging
> their scripts, I had thought it would be useful to have some form of
> interactive debugger they could use at arbitrary moments during a
> Script Scan to inspect script threads. In particular, they would like
> to see all the threads waiting/running and inspect the stacks of the
> threads. I expect it would be as simple as adding an extra character
> command (like 'v' increases the verbosity) that signals to NSE the
> debugger should run.
>
> I don't think this is possible right now with (the basic) Lua debugger
> debug.debug [1] because Nmap takes control of the tty. There would
> need to be some changes (while maintaining compatibility) to
> nmap_tty.cc module to make this possible. Does this sound like a good
> idea?

What sort of changes? Is it possible to simply give up control of the
TTY before the debug session and regain it afterward?

Am I right in supposing that, the method of invoking the debugger aside,
some sort of TTY changes would be needed for any kind of interactive
debugging? If the debugger were started after a certain amount of time,
or programmatically by a library watching for a certain condition.

David Fifield

_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://SecLists.Org