Re: warning message when overwriting output files

[Daniel Miller <bonsaiviking () gmail com>]

I recall having a conversation once about a potential output file
rotation feature. It seems like this could be a related problem, in
that it involves rewriting file names. If we can decide on a good
notation, then this could be used in both cases. Maybe adding another
percent-escaped value for "incrementing ID" such that -oN
example-%n.nmap would create example-0.nmap on the first run,
otherwise it would write example-1.nmap or whatever is one higher than
the highest currently-named file in the output directory. This would
be an easy way to guarantee you never clobber output.

Nmap does not have an rcfile capability right now, though Jacek did a
little work in that direction, IIRC.

Dan

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Robin Wood <robin@digi.ninja> wrote:
> I think appending something if the file already exists would be best but it
> may mess up people who expect the overwrite in scripted jobs.
>
> Renaming could work as well.
>
> I should know this but is there any way to have a resource file for nmap?
> That would be a good way to handle this, the default is overwrite but a
> config setting would say rename or change output name as appropriate. A lot
> of work for this feature but I can think of a lot of other use cases for the
> feature.
>
> Robin
>
> On 12 Nov 2014 19:42, "Daniel Miller" <bonsaiviking () gmail com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Robin Wood <robin@digi.ninja> wrote:
> > > It would be good to have a warning when a scan which does outputs
> > > (-o?) is going to overwrite existing files. I've just managed to lose
> > > a load of work when I switched from TCP to UDP and forgot to change
> > > the filename.
> >
> > Robin,
> >
> > That sounds like a good idea. How would you expect it to act? We don't
> > have any other interactive features, so asking for confirmation would
> > be a departure from our usual way of doing things. We could also just
> > append to the filename if it exists, or copy the old one to X.orig, or
> > something.
> >
> > For future reference, I usually avoid this problem by including %T in
> > my output filename to include the timestamp, so unless I do two scans
> > within a second of each other, there's no clobbering.
> >
> > Dan
_______________________________________________
Sent through the dev mailing list
http://nmap.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/