nasl (1) Linux Manual Page
nasl – Nessus Attack Scripting Language
Synopsis
nasl <[-vh] [-T tracefile] [-s] [-t target] [-sX] > files…Description
nasl executes a set of NASL scripts against a given target host. It can also be used to determine if a NASL script has any syntax errors by running it in parse (-p) or lint (-L) mode.Options
- -T tracefile
- Makes nasl write verbosely what the script does in the file tracefile , ala ‘set -x’ under sh
- -t target
- Apply the NASL script to target which may be a single host (127.0.0.1), a whole subnet (192.168.1.0/24) or several subnets (192.168.1.0/24, 192.168.243.0/24)
- -s
- Sets the return value of safe_checks() to 1. (See the nessusd manual to know what the safe checks are)
- -D
- Only run the description part of the script.
- -L
- Lint the script (run extended checks).
- -X
- Run the script in authenticated mode. For more information see the nasl reference manual
- -h
- Show help
- -v
- Show the version of NASL.
- -L
See Also
The NASL2 reference manual, http://www.nessus.org/nasl2ref.pdf, nessus(1), nessusd(8).History
NASL comes from a private project called ‘pkt_forge’, which was written in late 1998 by Renaud Deraison and which was an interactive shell to forge and send raw IP packets (this pre-dates Perl’s Net::RawIP by a couple of weeks). It was then extended to do a wide range of network-related operations and integrated into Nessus as ‘NASL’.The parser was completely hand-written and a pain to work with. In Mid-2002, Michel Arboi wrote a bison parser for NASL, and he and Renaud Deraison re-wrote NASL from scratch. Although the "new" NASL was nearly working as early as August 2002, Michel’s lazyness made us wait for early 2003 to have it working completely.