Nmap Development mailing list archives
Re: Weird target specifications
From: Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:19:19 -0800
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 09:05:26PM -0700, David Fifield wrote:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 03:51:37PM -0700, David Fifield wrote:On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 02:07:09PM -0800, Fyodor wrote:Is there any reason why these half-open and full-open ranges aren't documented? Looking at the TargetGroup.cc code, support for them was intentional and not just an artifact of parsing.
Sometimes we just forget to document features (particularly true of ancient ones such as this). Other times (rarely) a feature is considered minor enough that it isn't worth documenting due to the increase in complexity of the documentation. But even if that was the case for this sort of half-open ranges, the addition of full-open ranges pushes it into deserving documentation, IMHO. There are also times when we don't document a feature because it is deprecated and we don't really want to encourage its use. For example, perhaps if we document the use of '-' as an octet wildcard, we don't need to bother documenting '*' for the same purpose. Unfortunately, neither is perfect. '*' needs to be shell-escaped on many systems, while David noted that '-' causes can cause problems at the beginning of a specifier (Nmap thinks it is an option flag). I'm not sure which one (or both) of those we should document. I'm leaning toward just documenting '-' though. We just need to mention that if '-' appears as the first character in the specifier, you just need to prepend a zero. Or if it is easy to modify the argument parsing logic, perhaps we could fix the issue there (ignore this case during option parsing) and so we don't have to bother users with it at all. Cheers, -F _______________________________________________ Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev Archived at http://SecLists.Org
Current thread:
- Weird target specifications David Fifield (Feb 19)
- Re: Weird target specifications Fyodor (Feb 19)
- Re: Weird target specifications David Fifield (Feb 19)
- Re: Weird target specifications David Fifield (Feb 20)
- Re: Weird target specifications Fyodor (Feb 20)
- Re: Weird target specifications David Fifield (Feb 23)
- Re: Weird target specifications David Fifield (Feb 19)
- Re: Weird target specifications Fyodor (Feb 19)
- Re: New syntax for Ncat --allow and --deny Fyodor (Feb 20)
- Re: New syntax for Ncat --allow and --deny David Fifield (Feb 21)