Saving scan results in an XML format

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a widely known, tree-structured file format supported by Nmap. Scan results can be exported or written into an XML file and used for analysis or other additional tasks. This is one of the preferred file formats because all programming languages have very solid libraries for parsing XML and it is widely supported by third-party security tools.

The following recipe teaches you how to save scan results in XML format.

How to do it...

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

$ nmap -oX <filename> <target>

After the scan is finished, the new file containing the results will be written:

$ nmap -p80 -oX scanme.xml scanme.nmap.org
$ cat scanme.xml

You will get the following output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE nmaprun>
<?xml-stylesheet href="file...