Theo de Raadt wrote: > If you are going to introduce such complicated semantics, please > include a proposal for the manual page change so that we can see > if this can be simply described. Being dimply described in the > manual page is a marker for whether a change is suitable.
Stealing some words from chown... Index: nc.1 =================================================================== RCS file: /cvs/src/usr.bin/nc/nc.1,v retrieving revision 1.91 diff -u -p -r1.91 nc.1 --- nc.1 25 Sep 2018 20:05:07 -0000 1.91 +++ nc.1 22 Dec 2018 23:52:22 -0000 @@ -393,7 +393,7 @@ option is given). .Ar port can be a specified as a numeric port number, or as a service name. Ports may be specified in a range of the form -.Ar nn Ns - Ns Ar mm . +.Ar nn Ns : Ns Ar mm . In general, a destination port must be specified, unless the @@ -491,12 +491,12 @@ to report open ports, rather than initiate a connection. For example: .Bd -literal -offset indent -$ nc -z host.example.com 20-30 +$ nc -z host.example.com 20:30 Connection to host.example.com 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded! Connection to host.example.com 25 port [tcp/smtp] succeeded! .Ed .Pp -The port range was specified to limit the search to ports 20 \- 30. +The port range was specified to limit the search to ports 20 : 30. .Pp Alternatively, it might be useful to know which server software is running, and which versions. @@ -584,3 +584,9 @@ the combination could be useful for communications diagnostics. Note that the amount of UDP traffic generated may be limited either due to hardware resources and/or configuration settings. +.Pp +Previous versions of the +.Nm nc +utility used a hyphen to separate port ranges. +This was changed to a colon to avoid ambiguity with hyphenated service names, +though the hyphen separator remains supported for backwards compatibility.
