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 most preferred file formats, because all programming languages have very solid libraries for parsing XML.

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

How to do it...

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

# nmap -A -O -oX scanme.xml scanme.nmap.org

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

$cat scanme.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="file:///usr/local/bin/../share/nmap/nmap.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>
<!-- Nmap 6.02 scan initiated Thu Jun  28 19:34:43 2012 as: nmap -p22,80,443 -oX scanme.xml scanme.nmap.org -->
<nmaprun scanner="nmap" args="nmap...