Re: Bug report, with workaround

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:08:47PM -0600, David Fifield wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 12:32:23PM +0100, Mike Crawford wrote:
> > I've used Nmap before but was having grief today. To be more specific,
> > I'm using Zenmap on Windows XP.
> >
> > I could scan ok and some info was displayed about the target hosts. I
> > then got to the message saying how many hosts were scanned in what
> > time, and then an error "The system cannot find the path specified."
> > As in:
> >
> > Nmap done: 40 IP addresses (8 hosts up) scanned in 4.61 seconds
> > The system cannot find the path specified.
> >
> > At which point, the scan failed with no hosts/services being listed in
> > the left hand pane. After a while of tearing my hair out, I found a
> > file called r at C:\Documents and Settings which looked like something
> > to do with my scan results. The username I was running under in
> > Windows is "R & T blah blah" and it looks like the '&' (or maybe
> > spaces - haven't tested this) is causing problems for Nmap being able
> > to create the C:\Documents and Settings\R & T blah blah\.zenmap\zenmap
> > database file.
> >
> > I created another user account with no '&' in it and it was business
> > as usual for Nmap.
>
> Thanks for the detailed report. The problem is not with the .zenmap
> file, but with the temporary XML file Nmap creates when run by Zenmap.
> Zenmap sends the command through the Windows shell, and it is the shell
> that's interpreting the '&' character.
>
> On other platforms, the nmap command is not run using the shell, but
> with Python's equivalent of a raw exec (subprocess.Popen(shell=False) to
> be specific). I would like to do the same thing on Windows, but for some
> reason shell=False causes a console Window to be opened up every time
> Zenmap invokes Nmap.

I found a solution to this problem. It is to use the seemingly
undocumented subprocess.STARTUPINFO function to control whether a window
is created.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1016384/cross-platform-subprocess-with-hidden-window

It is committed in r15632. I tried scanning with a username containing
an & and it worked for me.

David Fifield

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