On 2/1/06, Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
>
> David Leimbach wrote:
>
> > The bash shell supports /dev/tcp.... kind of evil but you can make
> > connections and send strings via file redirection with it.
>
>
> so, on the 'how broken is that' scale, where does this one go?
>
> the scale, btw, goes from 1 to 11
>
> ron


Well, I've used it to send some data down to a server in a pinch before...
when testing things like xinetd servers etc etc.

It works kind of sort of Ok :)

Someone did an IRC client in bash with it once... don't know where that is
anymore.

For curiosity's sake:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/devref1.html

In fact I'm rather ashamed to admit I've done more network programming with
/dev/tcp in bash than I have with Plan 9 or Inferno :).  The whole clone
concept hasn't sunk in for me yet.

Some things just still don't feel *right* to me being done through the
filesystem.  Seems like a square peg in a round hole kind of abstraction
sometimes.  But *shrug*, it's probably cleaner than sockets :)

Keep in mind I spent about 2 years working with Sandia Portals a few years
back, so I've got all these whacky RDMA ideas now. :)

Dave