Can Telnet connect to a path?

I'm being told that I should expect to be able to telnet to an address in the form subdomain.domain.tld/path. This seems like an odd "host" for telnet to accept. Is there particular flags or something I'd need to be able to connect to such a target? Should it just work?
For instance:
telnet mysub.mydomain.tld 1234 is working.
telnet mysub.mydomain.tld/path 1234 is not.
This seems to make sense to me, I've never before encountered two connections separated by a path like this. They've always been on different parts if they share the same subdomain.
Is there some way I could verify this from outside the system hosting this? I am working with a client that is not providing much in the way of information or further assistance unless I specifically ask and in this case I am not sure what to even ask.

ToothlessRebel

Posted 2017-10-11T03:44:10.520

Reputation: 103

the thing you are missing is that telnet connects to a program, and programs expose connectivity via ports. when you put a URL in a browser, you are connecting to the web server process on tcp\80, and then the web server parses the path and gives it meaning. a program might or might not expose additional addressing components internally, but all telnet as a client is prepared to deal with is server port. – Frank Thomas – 2017-10-11T04:14:01.960

Thanks, but I was of the understanding that was true. I was wondering if there was something else I was missing to provide a way for this. – ToothlessRebel – 2017-10-11T04:57:03.250

Answers

As someone who used telnet to connect to talkers & muds before finding a mud client, I've never heard of connecting to a path, and the man pages indicate, there is no support for connecting to a path, just a host.

Quoting from the man page for telnet, as found here

open host [-l user] [ [-] port]
Open a connection to the named host. If no port number is specified, telnet will attempt to contact a TELNET server at the default port. The host specification may be either a host name (see hosts(5)) or an Internet address specified in the ''dot notation'' (see inet(3)). The -l option may be used to specify the user name to be passed to the remote system via the ENVIRON option. When connecting to a non-standard port, telnet omits any automatic initiation of TELNET options. When the port number is preceded by a minus sign, the initial option negotiation is done. After establishing a connection, the file .telnetrc in the user's home directory is opened. Lines beginning with a ''#'' are comment lines. Blank lines are ignored. Lines that begin without whitespace are the start of a machine entry. The first thing on the line is the name of the machine that is being connected to. The rest of the line, and successive lines that begin with whitespace are assumed to be telnet commands and are processed as if they had been typed in manually to the telnet command prompt.

Herb Wolfe

Posted 2017-10-11T03:44:10.520

Reputation: 264

Yes, I agree. I'll have to investigate further. – ToothlessRebel – 2017-10-11T04:11:10.907

@ToothlessRebel It's possible they actually want you to use a web browser to connect to that location with a non-standard port, or use telnet to do some sort of testing of a web server. Other than that, I can't imagine what they might be thinking. – Herb Wolfe – 2017-10-11T14:53:13.917

I wanted to know if it was possible, you answered that. My reasoning for asking was more curiosity. Later, I discovered they were in fact simply wrong (as suspected) and that they did in fact mean to have a different port on the same host. Thanks though! – ToothlessRebel – 2017-10-11T15:02:11.940

No, telneting to a path doesn’t make sense.

Scott

Posted 2017-10-11T03:44:10.520

Reputation: 17 653