Comment 2 for bug 590925

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Grondr (grondr) wrote :

I believe I was quite clear:

(a) "nc -l -p 1234" spits out a usage message. The traditional version actually listens on port 1234. Having finally found nc's manpage, I see that the OpenBSD version uses completely incompatible arguments, hence breaking scripts that expect the decades-old version and giving no real clue what happened, because:
(b) nc's usage message does not say it's from OpenBSD and has no version number, hence making debugging the change in behavior needlessly frustrating. (Not to mention that it has -only- a short-form usage message and fails to take --version or --help or any of the other canonical ways of getting more info, so it fakes people out into believing that it's basically the same set of options when in fact they're totally different.)

This is true in both 32- and 64-bit Lucid on any machine I've tried.

I note, btw, that using update-alternatives did -not- replace the OpenBSD manpage with the traditional one, even though it replaced the links in /etc/alternatives, so I now have the manpage for the OpenBSD version installed even though nc & netcat on my machines are actually the traditional version. This also seems buggy to me, since it's a really easy way to totally confuse people by showing them the manpage for the wrong program. I suppose I should file a bug report about that, too.