telnet - is there a maximum line limit?

Question

I am working on several servers that use HTTP for transport of commands.

What I have encountered is that some of the commands I am trying to issue by hand are very long GETs, several lines, and that when I telnet from my Mac to my Solaris system, I cannot seem to cut and paste the line successfully.

I get a couple bounching sounds (which I assume is a control-g - bell) and then it never pastes everything.

From trying to break it up into smaller pieces, I am getting the impression that TELNET, or my bundled telnet client or server has a maximum line length that I had never bumped into.

I did some googling and superusering, but did not find anything definitive.

Answer 1

I am pretty sure that there is no actual hard limit as I have done a lot of funky things through telnet.

I can only imagine that as you are hearing a beep, you have reached the limit/buffer of the session and/or the client is simply hard coded to a limit of characters.

If it was a limit on the server, it would of responded with an error upon sending the data and reaching the character limit.

You can try an alternate client such as Putty which handles Telnet connections very well.

(this is based on my past experiences, but I am not 100% sure as without being in the same situation, I cannot test it, if I am wrong, please say and I will delete my answer)

Answer 2

I experience this too, on OS X. For my purposes (also making manual HTTP requests!) I just put the request into a file and used cat request.txt | nc localhost 8080 to send the data.