On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 12:13:53PM -0400, Renaud Deraison wrote: > On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 12:08:47PM -0400, Christopher Harrington wrote: > > Looks like nmap 3.45 broken the compatibility with nmap_wrapper.nes, by > changing its output once again.
I do change the "human readable" output format whenever I find a better way to organize and present the data to users. The changes in 3.45 are to highlight table headers better and reduce wasted whitespace so that I have room for the new version detection feature ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/versionscan.html ). At the same time, I recognize that programs which call Nmap don't want to deal with parsing an ever-shifting format. This is why I provide the XML output format (-oX) and, to a lesser degree, the "grepable format" (-oG). Neither of these formats have had incompatible changes in years. The XML format even includes more information than "human readable", and breaks it up into easier-to-use chunks. For these reasons, I recommend that Nessus integrate with Nmap using the XML API. I believe the moderate time investment now would save a lot of frustration later from chasing the "human readable" format changes. In cases where normal output is desired too (e.g. if users want to read over the Nmap report), Nmap allows you to specify both -oN and -oX to send properly formatted results to each file. If you have any issues with converting to use the XML format, let me know and I may be able to help. The nmap-dev list is a good resource there as well -- many users on that list are already using the XML output in their nmap-related projects. Cheers, Fyodor
