Hi Ed and James,
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 09:45:05AM +0000, James Hogarth wrote:
$ nmap -Pn -p993 imap.gmail.com |& grep -q 'Host is up' && { ... }
And of course someday the printed text will change and I'll have to edit my scripts again! Oh well. :-/
Host is up wouldn't be right - you need to parse to see if the port is listed as open or closed...
Something like:
nmap -Pn -p993 imap.gmail.com | awk '$1 ~ /993/ {print $2}' | grep open
I read the man page, but wasn't thinking when I wrote the grep line :-p. You are right, looking for the port/service is the correct way.
I think the older package was nc, but I'm not very much in for of checking versions. That would unnecessarily complicate my simple scripts. I cannot use tcping as Ed suggested because it is not installed in these other systems, hence parsing nmap output seems my only viable option.
Thanks a lot for all the help.
Cheers,