The scripts used by the Nmap Scripting Engine may be considered another kind of data file. Scripts are stored in a scripts subdirectory of one of the directories listed in the section called “Using Customized Data Files”. The name of each script file ends in .nse. For all the details on scripts see Chapter 9, Nmap Scripting Engine.

All of the files in the script directory are executable scripts, except for one: script.db. This file is a plain-text cache of which categories each script belongs to. It should not be edited directly; use the --script-updatedb option instead.

NSE's extension modules (see the section called “NSE Libraries”) are stored in the nselib subdirectory of the Nmap data directory, normally the same one scripts is in. This is where modules like shortport and stdnse are kept, in files whose names end in .lua.