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--massive (-m)

This flag changes the way the search is performed, and is optimized to process large number of files, usually when processing nested directories containing many files.

The logic applied is this:

  1. It checks the file or directory is present in the file reveal_ignore.txt
  2. If it is not present, the file is clasified as text, binary or Excel
  3. Binary files are ignored
  4. The file is sent to a process pool if it is a regular text file
  5. If the file is of type Excel and they have not been excluded, it is stored in a list to be processed at the end after all text files have been processed
  6. Detailed results are stored in a CSV file
  7. Information about the execution and totals is written in a log file

Using this flag also sets the --parallel one, and the number of simultaneous processes can be defined with --limit

This flag implies processing Excel files, so if we want to exclude them we need to also use the --ignore flag

Executing the tools usinig this flag automatically creates two files with prefix rvl_<YYMMDDhhmmss>_

For example, we could end with these two files:

rvl_260708143205_dirty.csv
rvl_260708143205_log.txt

dirty.csv​

This file contains one line for each PAN that we find and not only a total per file as the other flag --write

It contains the following information:

CSV header: Confidence,Line,Column,Sheet,Cell,Bin Length,Pan Length,PAN,Brand,File

Example:

3,42,18,,,6,16,4006106887790013,Visa,/data/example.txt

For plain text files:

  • Line is the line number in the file.
  • Column is the starting position of the PAN.
  • Sheet and Cell are empty.
  • PAN contains the detected value.
  • File contains the file name and location.

For Excel files:

  • Sheet contains the sheet name.
  • Cell contains the cell reference, for example B12
  • Line may not contain the same information as for text files
  • PAN contains the value of the detected PAN

This is different than using --write, where each line contains just a summary for each file. The output of this flag generates a more detailed CSV file that also includes the values of the PANs.

log.txt​

This file contains information about the execution of the command. Some of that information is:

  • Execution start time
  • Status of loading of BIN list
  • Status of loading of whitelist file
  • List of patterns to ignore
  • Matching criteria
  • Files found to process
  • File clasification results
  • Ignored files/directories (taken from reveal_ignore.txt)
  • Access errors
  • Excel files that could not be processed
  • Totals

This flag always generate these two files unlike the normal mode where we have to indicate --write if we want an output to a file.

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