Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook

Reading targets from a text file

Sometimes we need to work with multiple hosts and perform more than one scan, but having to type a list of targets in the command line with each scan is not very practical. Fortunately, Nmap supports the loading of targets from an external file.

This recipe shows how to scan the targets loaded from an external file by using Nmap.

How to do it...

Enter the list of targets into a text file, each separated by a new line, tab, or space(s):

$cat targets.txt
192.168.1.23
192.168.1.12

To load the targets from the file targets.txt, the following command can be used:

$ nmap -iL targets.txt

This feature can be combined with any scan option or method, except for exclusion rules set by --exclude or --exclude-file. The option ...