Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills/skills/scanning-network-with-nmap-advanced/references/api-reference.md

API Reference: Scanning Network with Nmap Advanced

python-nmap Library

Installation

pip install python-nmap

Requires Nmap binary installed on the system (nmap must be in PATH).

Core Classes

nmap.PortScanner()

Main scanner class wrapping the Nmap command-line tool.

Method	Parameters	Returns	Description
scan()	hosts, ports, arguments	dict	Execute Nmap scan with given arguments
all_hosts()	-	list[str]	List of all scanned host IPs
nmap_version()	-	tuple	Installed Nmap version
command_line()	-	str	Nmap command that was executed

Scanner Result Access

scanner[host].state()              # Host state: 'up' or 'down'
scanner[host].all_protocols()      # ['tcp', 'udp']
scanner[host][proto].keys()        # List of port numbers
scanner[host][proto][port]         # Port info dict with keys: state, name, product, version
scanner[host].hostnames()          # [{'name': 'hostname', 'type': 'PTR'}]
scanner[host]['osmatch']           # OS detection results

Common Nmap Arguments

Argument	Purpose
-sS	TCP SYN scan (half-open, requires root)
-sV	Service version detection
-sC	Run default NSE scripts
-O	OS fingerprinting
-sn	Host discovery only (no port scan)
--script vuln	Run vulnerability detection scripts
-T0 to -T5	Timing templates (paranoid to insane)
--min-rate N	Minimum packets per second
-PE -PP -PS	ICMP echo, timestamp, TCP SYN discovery probes
-oX file	Output results in XML format

Output Parsing

scanner.csv()           # CSV-formatted scan results
scanner.scaninfo()      # Scan metadata (type, services scanned)
scanner.scanstats()     # Timing and host statistics

References

• python-nmap docs: https://pypi.org/project/python-nmap/
• Nmap Reference Guide: https://nmap.org/book/man.html
• NSE Script Categories: https://nmap.org/nsedoc/categories/