PNSCAN(1)

💖 pnscan — like, the manual page, bestie 💖

okay so. pnscan(1). it's giving multi threaded port scanning tool and honestly? iconic. let me walk you through it, no cap.

✨ NAME ✨

pnscan — a multi threaded port scanning tool 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pnscan [ options]  [ <CIDR | host-range> <port-range>]

pnscan [ options]  [ <port>]

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so this manual page is the lil quick rundown of the pnscan command. that's it. that's the intro. 🎀

pnscan is a tool you can use to survey TCP network services. like, go around politely knocking on ports and seeing who answers. obsessed.

When you use it with two command line arguments, it will scan the network/hosts and ports you indicated. periodt.

When you use it with no arguments, or just one, then it will read hostname/IP addresses from stdin and probe those. the single port/service argument is used as a default if no port is indicated on stdin. 🫶

For example, it can be used to survey the installed versions of SSH, FTP, SMTP, Web, IDENT and possibly other services. the range?? unmatched.

This program implements a multithreaded TCP port scanner. More information and new relaseses may be found at:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~pen/pnscan

(yes bestie, that's the original spelling of "relaseses" — we don't fix, we preserve 💖)

👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -h — Show summary of options. the little "help me" button. 🙈
• -v — Be verbose. it will talk. spill the tea. ☕
• -V — Print version.
• -d — Print internal debugging info. the messy behind-the-scenes lore. 💀
• -s — Lookup and print hostnames. > heads up: this will slow down the scan considerably. slow and pretty, whatever. 😭
• -S — Enable shutdown mode. With this enabled, pnscan will call shutdown(2) with an argument of 1 in order to half-close the TCP connection after any -w/-W arguments has been transmitted. The default is to wait for the remote party to close its end first (or until enough bytes has been received). so either you hang up first or you wait for them to hang up. classic. 💅
• -l — Line oriented output. This option will cause pnscan to try to locate the beginning of a line when a match (-r/-R) has been found, and only print up to the last byte/character on that line. clean edges only. ✨
• -w<string> — Request string to send. Please note that you must send any needed CR/LF characters as needed by the protocol since the string specified is sent as is (after escape characters has been decoded). no auto-formatting, bestie. you send exactly what you send. 🎀
• -r<string> — Response string to look for. the vibe check of the whole operation. 👀
• -W<hex list> — Hex coded request string to send. same energy as -w but in hex. 🔥
• -R<hex list> — Hex coded response string to look for.
• -L<length> — Max bytes of response to print. don't over-share. 🙈
• -t<msecs> — Connect/Write/Read timeout. patience is a virtue but not here. ⏳
• -n<workers> — Maximum concurrent worker threads to start. it's a whole girl group, not a solo act. 👑👑👑

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• nmap(1)

💜 AUTHOR 💜

pnscan was written by Peter Eriksson <pen@lysator.liu.se>. giving author, giving credit, giving main character energy. 🫶

okay that's the whole page, and for the cute sign-off: this is PNSCAN(1) — source/version PNSCAN(1) — dated 27 March 2002. yes, it's vintage. it's heritage. it slays in a historical way and you should still read it. bye bestie, go scan something responsibly 💖🌸🎀