Mastering the Nmap Scripting Engine

Printing verbosity messages

If you hate scripts that just seem to stop working because of a lack of information in the output, then you need to include verbosity messages in your scripts. The purpose of these messages is to inform users of what is going on behind the scenes while your script does its work. Verbosity messages should be clear and concise while explaining the progress of the current task.

The stdnse library offers the verbose() function to print these verbose messages:

• level: This is the level of verbosity needed to print the message. The number can be from 1 to 9 but, in practice, most developers use up to level 3 only.
• fmt: This outputs a properly formatted message.
• …: This is used to format arguments.

For example, to print a verbose ...