On Fri, 12 Sep 2014, Josh Triplett wrote:
* telnet: dead for 19 years. Used only by those who misspell 'nc' and hope for no 0xff bytes.
A slight exaggeration. A client that uses the actual telnet protocol is still invaluable for managing various fairly stupid devices.
Given the rarity of telnet for login, and the common use of telnet for a text connection to random ports, how insane would it be to make interactive invocation of telnet default to being clean and transparent (without the crazy escape characters), and require an explicit option to *enable* non-transparent operation?
I'd regard that as highly inconvenient. More inconvenient than retraining fingers to nc (although I'm biased since I've already done that).
Regardless, this is in no way an argument for keeping telnet in standard. -- Edward Allcutt