Command line stats

[Garth Webb]

I've noticed a few people on the list pulling stats from memcached by
telneting to the memcached port.  The problem that you've probably found
(and what I found) was that something like this

  echo stats | nc memd-host 11211

doesn't work because the 'echo' sends "stats" a split second before the
connection is actually established.  So you have to cook thing up like:

  (sleep 1; echo stats) | nc memd-host 11211
  
  echo stats | nc -i1 memd-host 11211

This isn't ideal since you have to wait a full second to get any
information.  This isn't too bad with one memcached server, but with
several, the time to get a full report can be pretty long.

So, just as an FYI, here's some linux command line foo that we cooked up
that will return stats as quickly as memcached can be contacted and
return them:

  exec 9<>/dev/tcp/memd-host/11211 ; echo -e "stats\nquit" >&9; cat <&9

Obviously Perl/Python/Java will be able to do this for you, but this is
good for quick and dirty command line tools and simple monitoring
scripts.

Garth