I have a quick question about netcat.


My job requires me to regularly perform backups from some of our remote database servers. I have been utilising bash to achieve this:

mysqldump tablename | gzip | netcat (myip) (myport)

and on the local end

netcat -l -p (myport) > backup.sql.gz


This works great and I quite like the setup. the only problem is that the connection does not close when the command is complete. So I am currenly regularly checking the file system to see if the file size of the backup is still increasing (ie it is still downloading.) and then ctrl-c ing when i see it is complete. This is not the most elegant solution. not to mention error prone. Anyone know how to get netcat to close the connection when my gzip command finishes?

thanks!

Chain the commands together?

The && ("and") will run the second command upon the successful completion and exit of the first (if exit status is 0). (Note that I don't know anything about using netcat, so can't add the exact command.)

You can even add on a || "or" option, in case the command fails (exit status >0).

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Edit: I took a look at the netcat man page, and maybe I was wrong in my understanding. Am I right in understanding that the "listen" option doesn't exit? Well, I see that there is a -q "quit" option that will terminate the connection a set number of seconds after receiving an EOF. Would that do what you want?