Adding nc -q?

Scott Maxwell dl.scottmaxwell at gmail.com
Sun Jan 14 00:48:26 UTC 2007


Thanks to all busybox developers for your really amazing software,
which is making it easy and painless to develop some nifty stuff to
run on a Linksys router under DD-WRT.

I'm using busybox to help develop a simple watchdog script, for which
it would be very nice to have the functionality of "nc -q _seconds_".
This option causes nc to exit _seconds_ seconds after EOF.  The
current busybox nc doesn't seem to support this option or any
equivalent, so I end up having to use nc to repeatedly "ping" the
remote end in a loop, and exit the loop when there's no contact.  This
is inelegant and makes it hard to develop a correct solution.

Is anyone willing to add this option to nc?  If nobody wants to do it,
but there's no philosophical objection to adding it, I can take a
whack at adding it myself.

Either way, thanks again for the great application!

-- 
"Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying
replicators." -- Richard Dawkins



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