Features

Prior to writing nmap, I spent a lot of time with other scanners exploring the Internet and various private networks (note the avoidance of the "intranet" buzzword). I have used many of the top scanners available today, including strobe by Julian Assange, netcat by *Hobbit*, stcp by Uriel Maimon, pscan by Pluvius, ident-scan by Dave Goldsmith, and the SATAN tcp/udp scanners by Wietse Venema. These are all excellent scanners! In fact, I ended up hacking most of them to support the best features of the others. Finally I decided to write a whole new scanner, rather than rely on hacked versions of a dozen different scanners in my /usr/local/sbin. While I wrote all the code, nmap uses a lot of good ideas from its predecessors. I also incorporated some new stuff like fragmentation scanning and options that were on my "wish list" for other scanners. Here are some of the (IMHO) useful features of nmap:

• dynamic delay time calculations: Some scanners require that you supply a delay time between sending packets. Well how should I know what to use? Sure, I can ping them, but that is a pain, and plus the response time of many hosts changes dramatically when they are being flooded with requests. nmap tries to determine the best delay time for you. It also tries to keep track of packet retransmissions, etc. so that it can modify this delay time during the course of the scan. For root users, the primary technique for finding an initial delay is to time the internal "ping" function. For non-root users, it times an attempted connect() to a closed port on the target. It can also pick a reasonable default value. Again, people who want to specify a delay themselves can do so with -w (wait), but you shouldn't have to.
  
  
• retransmission: Some scanners just send out all the query packets, and collect the responses. But this can lead to false positives or negatives in the case where packets are dropped. This is especially important for "negative" style scans like UDP and FIN, where what you are looking for is a port that does NOT respond. In most cases, nmap implements a configurable number of retransmissions for ports that don't respond.
  
  
• parallel port scanning: Some scanners simply scan ports linearly, one at a time, until they do all 65535. This actually works for TCP on a very fast local network, but the speed of this is not at all acceptable on a wide area network like the Internet. nmap uses non-blocking i/o and parallel scanning in all TCP and UDP modes. The number of scans in parallel is configurable with the -M (Max sockets) option. On a very fast network you will actually decrease performance if you do more than 18 or so. On slow networks, high values increase performance dramatically.
  
  
• Flexible port specification: I don't always want to just scan all 65535 ports. Also, the scanners which only allow you to scan ports 1 - N sometimes fall short of my need. The -p option allows you to specify an arbitrary number of ports and ranges for scanning. For example, '-p 21-25,80,113, 60000-' does what you would expect (a trailing hyphen means up to 65536, a leading hyphen means 1 through). You can also use the -F (fast) option, which scans all the ports registered in your /etc/services (a la strobe).
  
  
• Flexible target specification: I often want to scan more then one host, and I certainly don't want to list every single host on a large network to scan. Everything that isn't an option (or option argument) in nmap is treated as a target host. As mentioned before, you can optionally append /mask to a hostname or IP address in order to scan all hosts with the same initial bits of the 32 bit IP address. You can use the same powerful syntax as the port specifications to specify targets like '150.12.17.71-79.7.*'. '*' is just a shortcut for 0-255, remember to escape it from your shell if used.
  
  
• detection of down hosts: Some scanners allow you to scan large networks, but they waste a huge amount of time scanning 65535 ports of a dead host! By default, nmap pings each host to make sure it is up before wasting time on it. It also does thin in parallel, to speed things up. You can change the parrallel ping lookahead with '-L' and the ping timeout with '-T'. You can turn pinging off completely with the '-D' command line option. This is useful for scanning networks like microsoft.com where ICMP echo requests can't get through. Nmap is also capable of bailing on hosts that seem down based on strange port scanning errors. It is also meant to be tolerant of people who accidentally scan network addresses, broadcast addresses, etc.
  
  
• detection of your IP address: For some reason, a lot of scanners ask you to type in your IP address as one of the parameters. Jeez, I don't want to have to 'ifconfig' and figure out my current address every time I scan. Of course, this is better then the scanners I've seen which require recompilation every time you change your address! nmap first tries to detect your address during the ping stage. It uses the address that the echo response is received on, as that is the interface it should almost always be routed through. If it can't do this (like if you don't have host pinging enabled), nmap tries to detect your primary interface and uses that address. You can also use -S to specify it directly, but you shouldn't have to (unless you want to make it look like someone ELSE is SYN or FIN scanning a host.
  
  

 -v (verbose): This is highly recommended for interactive use.  Among other
useful messages, you will see ports come up as they are found, rather than
having to wait for the sorted summary list.

 -r (randomize): This will randomize the order in which the target host's
ports are scanned.

 -q (quash argv): This changes argv[0] to FAKE_ARGV ("pine" by default).
It also eliminates all other arguments, so you won't look too suspicious in
'w' or 'ps' listings.

 -h for an options summary.

 -R show and resolve all hosts, even down ones.