Greg A Woods <woods@weird.com> writes:

    > got around to it.  I too find the lack of a 'netcat'-like
    > tool to be a major gap in any modern Unix with otherwise
    > integrated networking facilities.  To not be able to do
    > low-level network operations from shell scripts would be
    > like not being able to directly manipulate files from shell
    > scripts!

I agree, though i'm not surprised by the resistance.

    > unmaintainable spaghetti ;-): I need a very simple "line
    > mode" so that 'nc' can be used in place of telnet to do
    > things like converse with SMTP daemons; with (optional) EOL
    > conversions too, of course....

I'm not sure what you mean.  I use nc to talk SMTP and HTTP all
the time.  I type into it just like i would cat.

-- 
Eric Gillespie, Jr. <*> epg@pretzelnet.org

"This movie sure is gory!"
"Yeah, but that's one cute pig."