Saving Nmap Scan Outputs
Learn how to save Nmap scan results and export them as XML and text.
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To understand how scanning works, we’ll perform simplified versions of Nmap scans. But in the real world, scanning takes a while. If we try to scan all the 65,000+ ports of a single server, it’ll take us a minimum of 30 minutes to finish the scan. And when we scan a network of computers, it’ll only increase the overall scan time.
In addition to the time delays, network audits might take a few days or even weeks. So, it’s a waste of time to perform the same scans multiple times. To help with this, Nmap offers a few options to save the results. Let’s see how these work.
Saving scan results
We can save any Nmap scan result using the -o
command. We can save the result as XML or text. Let’s look at each one of them.
Normal result (text)
We can use the -oN
flag to save the output as a text file. This will give us the exact scan results saved in a .txt
file. Here’s the command to save the result as a text file.
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