Breaking the telnet addiction with netcat


After many years of use it’s become almost second nature to type ‘telnet ’ when I need to see if a system has TCP port open. Newer systems no longer install telnet by default:

$ telnet google.com 80

-bash: telnet: command not found

I can’t think of a valid reason to keep telnet around (there are probably valid use cases). Since netcat and tcpdump are a billion times better for debugging TCP issues, I need to apply newer microcode to my brain to perform a ‘s/telnet/nc -v/g’ each time I need to test if a TCP port is open:

$ nc -v google.com 80

Connection to google.com 80 port [tcp/http] succeeded!

Anyone else have a telnet attachment they just can’t break? :)

This article was posted by Matty on 2012-06-26 15:13:00 -0400 -0400