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Read the damn manpage

aniggler.tumblr.com

1 pointniggler3 comments

Are you actually going after someone for a hostname resolution thing when the "b" in "bcp" is for broadcast? As in, you run it on a subnet and they "magically" find each other?

You can use broadcast addresses in nc, like with any other utility: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_address

The comment itself suggested that the person didn't read the manpage (saw that the synopsis said `hostname` and concluded that it didnt support ip address). That seems like a pretty uninformed reading of the manpage.

More generally it's frustrating when self-proclaimed experts don't know all of the command options (hard to be an expert without knowing what's going on). I've done interviews where a candidate claims to be an expert with XYZ tool and not know the most common features.

Why don't you give an example in your blog post on how you would use "nc" to transfer a file between two machines without knowing their addresses, then?

(And.. are you sure TCP works on broadcast? Because on my OS X machine it doesn't seem to take:

  % sudo nc -v 255.255.255.255 9696
  nc: connect to 255.255.255.255 port 9696 (tcp) failed: Permission denied

)

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