On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 3:12 AM, Suvayu Ali fatkasuvayu+linux@gmail.com wrote:
Hi John,
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 08:37:27PM -0600, inode0 wrote:
Something like this perhaps.
$ 2>/dev/null >/dev/tcp/imap.gmail.com/993 && sync-my-email.sh
This works, but I don't think I understand it. Could you please explain?
Bash provides built-in ways to manipulate sockets directly. You can read the REDIRECTION section of the bash man page to get the basics. Commonly these are used in conjunction with exec to open a socket, read and/or write data to the socket, then close the socket.
In the simple case here we just have bash attempt to open a tcp socket to imap.gmail.com on port 993 and return whether it was successful or not. The advantage of doing this is that we don't need to rely on any external program to perform such a simple test.
John