UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

For a variety of strange reasons, I've set up an arrangement by which a server responds with "Hi there" if I connect on a specified port. This is a typical transaction:

Code:

# telnet example.com 3334
Trying 123.456.789.101...
Connected to example.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
Hi there
Connection closed by foreign host.

Now, I'm trying to use a quick and dirty way to do this concurrently, using xarg's -P (or max-procs, in some cases) option. Once this works, I'll increase the seq value, add -P concurrency, and be happy. The problem, though, is that I can't get the server's response to show up. Here's a trivial case:

Code:

# seq 1 | xargs -I DISCARD telnet example.com 3334
Trying 123.456.789.101...
Connected to example.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.

So, the "1" should be discarded, as there is no DISCARD string in the command called by xargs, and the telnet command should be run. But, this trivial case should be the same thing as just running the telnet command alone since it's wrapped up in a negligible xargs. But, for some reason, the server's "Hi there" doesn't appear. Any idea why that is? I've tried redirecting stderr to stdout on the chance that it's some oddity in the way xargs handles errors, but no luck. I've also placed the telnet command into a little one-liner script and called that instead, without changing the output. Any suggestions? I've scratched my head many times. It didn't help... Many thanks in advance.

It seems to have something to do with networking. Try

Code:

seq 1 | xargs -I DISCARD telnet example.com 3334 |cat

Tragically, that seems not to have helped, although it made me wonder (chasing low-percentage possibilities now...) if perhaps special character information exists. Alas, piping through cat -e showed nothing of value. This is truly strange.

On a related matter, is this the proper board for a thread like this? I'm not quite clear on what's basic and what allows me to sit at the grown-ups table. :-)

It's because, when run with xargs, the commands have no standard input connected. Usually it'd wait for input, either from your end or the other end, but now it connects, tries to read from the keyboard, gets EOF, and quits instantly instead.

You can get around this by giving xargs a file listing arguments instead of reading them from stdin, i.e. list-servers > filename ; xargs -a filename command but it still requires stdin to be something terminal-like, meaning, it'd break down again if you tried to run this from a cron job instead of a terminal. 'telnet' may not be the best command for this, you might want to investigate netcat(nc)

Sure enough, that works. Thanks for the help. And you're right... telnet is a rather awkward tool for this. I decided not to use netcat because I wasn't aware it existed :-). Many thanks for the pointer. It looks like a very broadly-applicable tool that's very much worth learning about.