Saving Nmap Scan Outputs

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.