Wayne Chirnside wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:



RJT> Hm.  What is it that you're trying to snag output from?  It may be that
RJT> it doesn't output to stdout,  but instead goes a little more directly,
RJT> like writing to video ram or somesuch.  A number of years back that was
RJT> "the way things were done" in _way_ too many programs, 
and I hated it
RJT> for portability.

WC> A "scan" command I found in one of Basic Linux's  directories. What 
WC> I did was telnet to outgoing.verizon.net (what everyone else calls 
WC> SMTP) and got the address in nnnn.nnnn.nnnn.nnnn numerical format 
WC> than scan'ed that DNS which caused Linux to output to screen every 
WC> single supported port as well as identifying what it did all the 
WC> way from 255 down to 0./ I'd wanted to save that list.

It may also be that the program is dumping to stderr,  rather than
stdout...  If the other stuff we're trying doesn't work try sticking 2>1
in there,  that'll redirect stderr to stdout and that to wherever you
want...

RJT> You could try a pipe:  |

WC> Dang, you know I've seen enough Linux syntax to have thought of
WC> that but didn't, redirect and pipe it into the file that's the
WC> ticket!. Untried but intuition tells me this is correct.

RJT> As long as the program uses stdin and stdout,  yeah.

WC> I've got other problems just now and it'll be days before this 
WC> kludged computer is up to snuff. Well at least I'm in the Pentium
WC> now.

WC> MC can be a hinderence in the long run IMHO keeping you from
WC> learning far more powerful tools.

RJT> Not necessarily.  One of the things that I did after installing was to
RJT> use mc's F3 (view) function to look at all sorts of stuff.  Just went
RJT> all *over* the HD,  looking at stuff.  This goes for executables,  
RJT> too.  On some of them (usually the larger ones) you'll see "ELF" 
RJT> near the beginning and a bunch of garbage -- those are compiled 
RJT> binaries.

There's still useful info in those -- try strings (filename) for what I mean...

RJT> Then there are scripts,  all over the place.  I was perusing a 
RJT> couple of them last night and actually sorta understood what was 
RJT> going on in most of it.

WC>  Yeah it's cool for looking around but I'm still sold on doing it 
WC> the other way when I get up to speed.

I dunno,  I'm just used to looking at things with tools like that.  I used
to use something called "Q-DOS" as a file handling utility,  but
it got weird when you had more than about 700 files in a directory,  and
stopped working altogether from dos 5 onwards,  until I got a later
version.  It was still pretty limited,  though,  so I ended up switching to
InspectA.  I like that a lot,  though the OS/2 version is broken for large
drives.  OTOH I can also see where the dual-directory aspects of mc can
come in handy for a number of things...



WC> Learning scripting syntax is very high on my list of priorities.

RJT> I have a set of files here someplace that does a pretty good job of
RJT> describing bash scripting,  let me know if you want 'em.

WC> If simplified yes otherwise I've already got a couple of rather
WC> pricey and comprehensive text books on hand.

You okay with uuencoded email,  then?  Let me know and I'll send them along...

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