Say hello to portping —28 March 2016

I found a good purpose for Go: a command line tool to ping ports. I often need something like this at work, and it’s a PITA that there’s no telnet command in Windows. Actually, telnet is not even very practical for the purpose. (nmap would be good, a bit too good, and pose a security risk.)

I researched first if such tool already exists. I found CryPing, which does what I need, but… Do I really want to install a closed-source program of some guy in Windows? Noooope!

I also researched for similar tools on godoc.org. But I couldn’t find a command line tool, only some bloated libraries that did much more than what I wanted, and not really the way I wanted.

And why Go? Because I can easily build cross-platform. Installation is a simple download of an exe, no other tools like a JVM or a Python interpreter needed, simply runs natively.

So I put together portping: https://github.com/janosgyerik/portping

Posted for code review as well: Port pinger command line tool

I have something that works, I called it v1.0. There are plenty of opportunities for improvement, I left many TODO comments in the code. I hope you might find this interesting to contribute to.