Bashscripts.org

I'm trying to create a simple UDP remote server.

I'd like to use nc inside a bash script, something like this:

while true; do
woot = $(nc -lu 1234)
if [ $woot = "E" ]; then
do something
else
do nothing
fi
done

I'm just a little newb-ish on parsing the stdout from things like nc, and especially whether to use the $() as above or some other syntax.

Any help (even rtfm [with a link]) would be appreciated!

What you had written down was already pretty much working pseudo code
I did change the udp part from netcat to tcp, just because I couldn't get it to work in the 5 minutes I tried.

You can start that up and test it with:

Yes, thanks, that worked. However, I still need to figure out a UDP version.

While fooling around with your script, I noticed that it didn't work with:

user$ nc 127.0.0.1 1234
>F
>G
>E

-- which is how I've been opening "Sessions" to test my scripting. Didn't work, that is, until i escaped that line with an alt-C. At that time, The "Server" script spit out the appropriate responses. Conversely, I tried your script with the addition of -u arg to nc to see if udp would work. I couldn't get it to work with the above method (nc -u 127....), or by echoing to /dev/udp/host/port.

That's right, woot=$(nc -l 1234) basically means to put the (entire) output of the netcat command in variable 'woot'.
The netcat command is only complete when it is done (terminated). Then and only then, the variable 'woot' is filled with the entire output of netcat.

I had the same issue with UDP as you.

Did you solve them?

What you say regarding terminating netcat makes sense, especially since the script functions identically after the while loop is removed.
I have to believe there's is a rather easy solution to this.
Is there no way to store the output of nc in a variable and parse it for linefeed at the same time?

can the output of nc be piped to awk or sed to parse each character and put it in a variable?

#!/bin/bash
nc -l 1234 | awk '{print $1 " =message received" }' ' <-- this works, prints each line, and $1 is always the last string sent and returned, I just don't know where to go from here.