Early on in many penetration test or security assessment, you will often find yourself wading through what seems like hundreds or thousands of text files, each seemingly hundreds or thousands of pages long (likely because they are). One key to success in these situations is to automate the analysis of these files as much as possible – you want to get the “drudgery” job done and move on to subsequent tasks that need real eyes on the screen and hands on the keyboard.
Let’s look at NMAP for instance. It’s a valuable tool, we all use it. But if you are scanning a /16 or a /8 network (or even lots of /24’s), the volume of output can be .. daunting? .. significant? .. collosal ?
Source : InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog