Send UDP messages with /dev/udp

The bash shell comes with two pseudo-devices for TCP and UDP network communication at /dev/tcp and /dev/udp. To use either in bash, you need to read or write to the device appending the host and port to the end of the path — e.g., /dev/tcp/google.com/80. The primary reason I use the pseudo-devices is it’s easier for me to remember than the netcat. But if I wanted a portable solution, then netcat is the winner. Either case, learning of bash's TCP and UDP pseudo-devices tickled my brain.

For my day to day work, the /dev/udp comes in handy for sending statsd metrics to the local statsd server process on PlanGrid servers. statsd has a wire protocol that looks like:

METRIC_NAME:METRIC_VAL|TYPE

# Example: counting 200 status codes for nginx:
nginx.status_200:1|c

Here is how to send the above metric via bash's UDP pseudo-device:

echo "nginx.status_200:1|c" >/dev/udp/127.0.0.1/8125

The other portable way is with netcat (nc):

echo "nginx.status_200:1|c" | nc -u -w0 127.0.0.1 8125

This post was originally published on medium.com.