I've not been around this mailing list all too long, so I don't know if this has been debated before, but I have always attempted to avoid using external programs where functionality within bash can meet a requirement. Doing this allows my scripts to be more reliable, and not depend on those external tools being installed...
I have however found it extremely frustrating to open TCP connections via /dev/tcp, because there appears to be no way to control the timeout! This means I cannot "try one server and move on to the next if it's not responding" etc... the default timeout is quite long, so even a simple script to check a list of servers for a response on a given port is problematic. Is this a feature which might be possible in a future version of Bash? I realise that the action can be performed in a subshell, with the use of "timeout", but to my knowledge, a file descriptor cannot be passed back from that subshell, which makes communicating with a remote system once the connection is open quite challenging/inconvenient. -- A. James Lewis <ja...@fsck.co.uk>
