I have checked about the function of "-n" -- "Displays active TCP connections, however, addresses and port numbers are expressed numerically and no attempt is made to determine names." But I can't see why "-n" can make netstat exit immediately?
1 Answers
From a quick check, I don't see the same description for the "-n" option as you do, and it doesn't make netstat run continuously.
As you didn't specify the version and exact command you are using, I tried both the version that comes with RH7.6 (net-tools 2.10-alpha) and the latest from source code (net-tools 3.14-alpha). The net-tools source code can be found in github [1].
As I couldn't find the exact option you describe, I tried all flags (without combinations) that don't require an argument. As far as I can tell the only options that cause netstat to not exit immediately are '-g' and '-c'. '-c' makes sense as it is the flag for running netstat continuously. For '-g' it isn't as obvious as the continuous behavior is coming from reading the /proc/net/igmp and /proc/net/igmp6 files line-by-line. The first file is read quickly but the igmp6 file takes much longer (1 line per ~1 sec). The '-g' option isn't really continuous, but just takes a lot of time to finish.
From the code, the only reason for continuous execution is (appears 4 times in the code):
if (i || !flag_cnt)
break;
wait_continous();
'i' is a return code from a function and the 'break' command is to break from an infinite for loop, so basically the code will run continuously only if flag_cnt is set (only happens when '-c' is provided) and there were no errors with previous commands.
For the specific issue above there could be a few reasons:
- The option involves reading from a file and it takes very long time to finish, but it is not really continuous.
- There's a correlation between the given option and flag_cnt, which cause flag_cnt to be set.
- There's a call to wait_continous() which doesn't follow the condition above.
As I said, I couldn't reproduce the issue in the original question, nor could I find any flag with the description above. Also, non of the flags besides '-c' caused netstat to run continuously.
If you still want to figure this out I suggest you take a look at your code, or at least specify the net-tools version you use. The kernel version is also important as some code would be compiled-out due to missing kernel support.
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