Package: netcat-openbsd Version: 1.89-4 Severity: normal It seems that the behavior of the -q flag for netcat-openbsd is the exact opposite of the behavior for the same flag in netcat-traditional, despite the documentation being the same. Here's the documentation:
0 d...@pip:~$ man nc_traditional | grep -A1 ' -q' -q seconds after EOF on stdin, wait the specified number of seconds and then quit. If seconds is negative, wait forever. 0 d...@pip:~$ man nc_openbsd | grep -A1 ' -q' -q after EOF on stdin, wait the specified number of seconds and then quit. If seconds is negative, wait forever. 0 d...@pip:~$ Look at the timeouts for these connections (/usr/bin/ts is from the moreutils package): 0 d...@pip:~$ time printf 'GET / HTTP/1.1\nHost: nytimes.com\n\n' | nc.openbsd -q10 nytimes.com 80 | ts '%H:%M:%.S' 20:27:38.205106 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently 20:27:38.205425 Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1 20:27:38.205489 Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 01:27:38 GMT 20:27:38.205541 Content-length: 122 20:27:38.205590 Content-type: text/html 20:27:38.205639 Location: http://www.nytimes.com/ 20:27:38.205688 nnCoection: close 20:27:38.205736 20:27:38.205784 <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Moved Permanently</TITLE></HEAD> 20:27:38.205834 <BODY><H1>Moved Permanently</H1> 20:27:38.205883 An error has occurred. 20:27:48.105500 </BODY></HTML> real 0m10.103s user 0m0.088s sys 0m0.008s 0 d...@pip:~$ time printf 'GET / HTTP/1.1\nHost: nytimes.com\n\n' | nc.openbsd nytimes.com 80 | ts '%H:%M:%.S' 20:27:53.522015 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently 20:27:53.522315 Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1 20:27:53.522376 Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 01:27:53 GMT 20:27:53.522426 Content-length: 122 20:27:53.522474 Content-type: text/html 20:27:53.522521 Location: http://www.nytimes.com/ 20:27:53.522570 Connection: close 20:27:53.522617 20:27:53.522665 <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Moved Permanently</TITLE></HEAD> 20:27:53.522714 <BODY><H1>Moved Permanently</H1> 20:27:53.522763 An error has occurred. 20:27:53.553898 </BODY></HTML> real 0m0.135s user 0m0.088s sys 0m0.004s 0 d...@pip:~$ time printf 'GET / HTTP/1.1\nHost: nytimes.com\n\n' | nc.traditional -q10 nytimes.com 80 | ts '%H:%M:%.S' 20:28:00.222656 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently 20:28:00.222931 Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1 20:28:00.222994 Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 01:28:00 GMT 20:28:00.223048 Content-length: 122 20:28:00.223098 Content-type: text/html 20:28:00.223150 Location: http://www.nytimes.com/ 20:28:00.223201 nnCoection: close 20:28:00.223252 20:28:00.223303 <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Moved Permanently</TITLE></HEAD> 20:28:00.223355 <BODY><H1>Moved Permanently</H1> 20:28:00.223406 An error has occurred. 20:28:00.479129 </BODY></HTML> real 0m0.361s user 0m0.088s sys 0m0.004s 0 d...@pip:~$ time printf 'GET / HTTP/1.1\nHost: nytimes.com\n\n' | nc.traditional nytimes.com 80 | ts '%H:%M:%.S' 20:28:05.244744 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently 20:28:05.245017 Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1 20:28:05.245080 Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 01:28:05 GMT 20:28:05.245130 Content-length: 122 20:28:05.245178 Content-type: text/html 20:28:05.245225 Location: http://www.nytimes.com/ 20:28:05.245273 nnCoection: close 20:28:05.245320 20:28:05.245367 <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Moved Permanently</TITLE></HEAD> 20:28:05.245416 <BODY><H1>Moved Permanently</H1> 20:28:05.245464 An error has occurred. 20:33:20.109584 </BODY></HTML> real 5m14.963s user 0m0.080s sys 0m0.008s 0 d...@pip:~$ Thanks for netcat. it's a very useful tool. Regards, --dkg PS i have netcat-traditional 1.10-38 installed. feel free to reassign this bug to that package if you think the bug is over there. hopefully these two implementations can come to some consensus over the proper behavior of the arguments. -- System Information: Debian Release: squeeze/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (200, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.36-trunk-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages netcat-openbsd depends on: ii libc6 2.11.2-7 Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib ii libglib2.0-0 2.24.2-1 The GLib library of C routines netcat-openbsd recommends no packages. netcat-openbsd suggests no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org