Discussion: New logging features

[Thibaud Kehler <nmap-dev () t3 sy gs>]

Hello All,

first I want to say "Thank you" to all contributors to Nmap. As a
penetration tester I use Nmap on a daily basis and really enjoy what the
tool has become. However there are some things that really bug me
concerning the logging, which is why I want to propose some changes:

1. Log file overwrite

By default Nmap overwrites log files without warning or asking for
permission. Too frequently have I lost my output and was forced to redo
a scan -- which may take a long time sometimes.

I see two ways to solve this problem:
 A. New option --overwrite
   Abort with an error when overwriting an existing file, unless
   the flag option --overwrite has been set.
   Pro: very safe
   Con: Not compatible with exiting scripts and wrapper
 B. New option --no-overwrite
   Abort with an error when overwriting an exiting file, if the flag
   option --no-overwrite has been set.
   Pro: downward compatibility
   Con: not so safe (but might be set by default in an alias)

2. strftime-like conversions in the filename

strftime has many more conversions, e.g. %F for the ISO 8601 date
format, and I would love to use them in Nmap directly.

3. Default log file names

Like other tools, e.g. testssl --log, Nmap could automatically generate
log file names based on the target and some essential parameters. This
would be nice to have, but might require a more more extensive work.


To avoid unnecessary work effort, I would like to discuss these changes
with you, before I work out a pull request.

So what do you think?

-- 
Kind regards

Thibaud Kehler, M.Sc.
IT Security Consultant

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