This is a quick post to show how one can issue commands to telnet session from a shell script or command line with out going into interactive mode. I use this to get stats from our memcache servers or issue a flush_all via telnet from a script/cron.

So without further delay, following command will telnet to local memcached server on port 11211 and issue one of the memcached commands, stats

(sleep .5;echo stats) | telnet localhost 11211
You may have to play with the sleep timer to get it to work for your environment but in our .5 was the sweet spot. Good luck and let me know if you have another shell command. Obviously we can do this from perl, php, python, etc but the beauty of this is that you do not need any other dependencies plus its a very short command.

Since “jsled” commented about nc (thanks jsled), here is the syntax to do the same thing with nc:

echo "stats" | nc localhost 11211