On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 04:38:21PM -0000, Grondr wrote: > Wait, what? Are you saying that nc -should- accept -p with -l?
Of course. Otherwise it'd be pointlessly incompatible with the old netcat. > In other words, that "nc -l -p 1234" is the same thing as "nc -l 1234" > in OpenBSD nc? No, it /is/ not. It should be. > But that wasn't what the manpage seemed to indicate -at all-. No, because it's not the case now. > It goes out of its way, in several places, to claim that this isn't > possible, It's not. From netcat.c: if (lflag && pflag) errx(1, "cannot use -p and -l"); We should just change that. > yes, changing this will restore a huge amount of compatibility with > the traditional nc, and I don't understand why OpenBSD went out of > their way (in both the code and the manpage) to make this not work in > the first place. Well, having to pass -p /is/ kind of silly. If you want to listen, you want to specify a port on which to do so, so making you pass the -p *option* only makes sense because of tradition. > P.S. You say you don't know where I was going w/my comment about > "broken" vs -l -p. I was simply trying to say that the current (bug? > deliberate change?) to the behavior of -l -p made it look like nc > simply couldn't be used as a listener at all, and that, when I wrote > the report, I hadn't yet discovered that the manpage for the OpenBSD's > version claimed that -l -p was simply incorrect usage (based on what > looked like a non-upward-compatible change) that that's why I was so > intemperate in my tone---until I found what looked like a deliberate > change in semantics (which you now say is a bug---I agree!), it looked > like the intended way to use nc as a listener had just somehow been > entirely broken instead. The OpenBSD folks may not see it as a bug at all. For us, it's a bug, because it pointlessly breaks compatibility. No doubt about that. -- Soren Hansen Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com/ -- broken version of netcat installed by default https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/590925 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs