Scanning a Network

Sometimes I want to know what systems are online. A handy way to discover that information is with the nmap command:

nmap -sn ${SUBNET}/24 | grep ’scan report'

Where ${SUBNET} is the local network subnet.

While the bash history and the Ctrl+R keyboard shortcut help to reuse the command, I created a scanlan alias:

alias scanlan="nmap -sn ${SUBNET}/24 | grep 'scan report'"

To be more portable the alias could be converted into a shell script where the script determines the actual subnet. For now the alias is sufficient.

Posted: October 25, 2022 Category: Usability Tagged: General