How do you feed Nmap with a list of targets using -iL, and what advantages does it provide?

• A. -iL reads targets from a file but is slower
• B. -iL can be used to specify individual IPs
• C. Use -iL <file> to read targets line by line
• D. -iL prints only target names

Answer: (C)

Feeding Nmap with a list of targets using -iL is about telling Nmap to pull its targets from a file instead of listing them on the command line. You place one target per line in a text file and pass that file to Nmap with -iL . Nmap reads the file and processes each non-empty line as a target, stopping at the end of the file.

This approach is powerful because it scales to large scans, keeps input organized, and makes automation easy. You can build or generate the list with other tools, reuse it across runs, and combine it with other options (like -p for ports or -sV for service version guessing) without retyping targets. Targets can be IP addresses, hostnames, or networks in CIDR notation, and you can include comments with lines starting with # or have blank lines that Nmap simply skips.

The other choices don’t fit because -iL is not just about specifying individual IPs on the command line, nor is it a feature that prints target names. Its primary role is to read targets from a file, one per line, for batch scanning.