USING SCRIPTING TO AUTOMATE THE PROCESS

It should be fairly obvious that our little netcat system described above is ripe for scripting. The first question one might ask is what sort of scripting language should be used. Many would immediately jump to using Python for this task. While I might like to use Python for many forensics and security tasks, it is not the best choice in this case.

There are a couple of reasons why shell scripting is a better choice, in my opinion. First, we want to minimize our memory footprint, and executing a Python interpreter runs counter to that goal. Second, a Python script that primarily just runs other programs is somewhat pointless. It is much simpler to execute these programs directly in a shell script. As an additional bonus for some readers, the scripts described here constitute a nice introduction to basic shell scripting.