Saving scan results in a grepable format

Nmap supports different file formats when saving the results of a scan. Depending on your needs, you may choose between the normal, grepable, and XML formats. The grepable format was included to help users extract information from logs without having to write a parser, as this format is meant to be read/parsed with standard Unix tools. Although this feature is deprecated, some people still find it useful to do quick jobs. In the following recipe, we will show you how to output Nmap scans in grepable format.

How to do it...

To save the scan results to a file in grepable format, add the -oG <filename> option, as shown in the following command:

$ nmap -oG <output file> <target>

The output file should appear after the scan is complete:

$ nmap -F -oG scanme.grep scanme.nmap.org
$ cat nmap.grep
# Nmap 7.40SVN scan initiated Thu Dec 29 15:21:44 2016 as: nmap -F - oG scanme.grep scanme.nmap.org
Host: 45.33.32.156 (scanme...