NAME

       openvas-nasl - Nessus Attack Scripting Language

SYNOPSIS

       openvas-nasl <[-vh] [-T tracefile] [-s] [-t target] [-sX] > files...

DESCRIPTION

       openvas-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.

SEE ALSO

       The NASL2 reference manual OpenVAS-Client(1), openvasd(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.

AUTHOR

       Most  of  the engine is (C) 2003 Michel Arboi, most of the built-in functions are (C) 2003
       Renaud Deraison