.TH NASL 1 "February 2003" "Nessus Project" "Nessus Attack Scripting Language"
.SH NAME
nasl \- Nessus Attack Scripting Language
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B nasl
.I <[-vh] [-T tracefile] [-s] [-t target]> files...
.SH DESCRIPTION
.BR nasl
executes a set of NASL scripts.

.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B \-T tracefile
Makes nasl write verbosely what the script does in the file
.I tracefile
, ala 'set -x' under sh

.TP
.B \-t target
Apply the NASL script to
.I 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)


.TP
.B \-s
Sets the return value of safe_checks() to 1. (See the nessusd manual to know
what the safe checks are)

.TP
.B \-h
Show help
.TP
.B \-v
Show the version of NASL.
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR http://www.nessus.org/doc/nasl.html,
.BR nessus (1),
.BR nessusd (8).
.SH 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.

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