Description of Problem:




nc (netcat) parses port names which are passed to it (cmdline) incorrectly if they include a dash ('-').









This became evident to me because /etc/services provides a service named "pop-3" but not "pop3". By the way, under Solaris, these are aliased:




$  ypcat services | egrep "pop.*3"




pop3            110/tcp         pop-3           # Post Office Protocol 3









Anyway, trying to use nc to connect to this port results in nc taking only everything up to the dash as the requested name:




$ nc hi1 pop-3




invalid port pop : Bad file number









The suspected reason is given under "additional information" below,.









Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):









1.10-*









How Reproducible:













Every time.



Steps to Reproduce:




1. 

call nc to have it connect to a port with a service name including a dash:    
$ nc myhost pop-3    


2. 




3. 









Actual Results:










Port name only gets parsed up to first dash.




Expected Results:













nc should correctly connect to the stated port. nc shouldn't parse a port _name_ (string!) as a range, rather take it literally.

Additional Information:




	




In netcat.c, there is    
a) a differentiation between port _names_ (i.e. beginning with a non-digit) and port _numbers_ (beginning with a digit, which is even documented in this source to obviously fail on port _names_ beginning with a digit)    
b) a check for port ranges.    
    
This check for port ranges seems to happen even when a given port is identified as a string. IMHO, range checks are really useful on numbers only (although you _might_ want to give "ftp-finger" as a port range).    
    
I guess you should rearrange code order somewhere below line 1553 of netcat.c to fix this.    
    
As a workaround, I also suggest a proper alias in /etc/services.  ;-)    
    
Thanks for listening,    
Moritz