socketwatch(1)

💅 socketwatch(1) — General Commands Manual, bestie

okay so picture this: it's the General Commands Manual, and the star of the show is socketwatch — a watchdog for network activity. she's giving supervisor energy and honestly? iconic. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

socketwatch — run a command under a watchdog for network activity 👀

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

socketwatch [options] <command> [arguments ...]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so socketwatch runs a command for you and then watches it — specifically it monitors its network activity, and it does that via an LD_PRELOAD library (yes, that's the whole trick, she's sneaky like that 💅). and if the command doesn't send or receive any network data for a stretch of time longer than the timeout value? socketwatch kills it. periodt. 💀

socketwatch exits when the command it started exits. and if socketwatch was the one that killed the command, then socketwatch exits with an error. otherwise — and this is the cute part — socketwatch exits with the command's own exit status. fr fr, she passes it right along 🌈

and now the important one, bestie, don't skip this: the argument -- disables argument parsing for all proceeding arguments. like, for example, socketwatch ls -l will pass -l to socketwatch and run ls, whereas socketwatch -- ls -l will run ls -l. see the difference?? that -- is doing so much work 👑

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -t, --timeout — Set the network activity timeout. ⏰ (this is literally the whole personality of the watchdog)
• -V, --version — Display version information. 💖
• -?, --help — Display a summary of command-line options. 🥺 asking for help is self care

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💀 LIMITATIONS 💀

okay, now the fine print — and ngl this part matters, so read it, don't scroll past 🙈

• socketwatch detects network activity only for file descriptors created within the command process and through socket(2).
• socketwatch detects network activity from only a limited subset of system calls: read(2) and write(2).
• socketwatch monitors only dynamically-linked system calls.
• socketwatch does not allow the command to fork or create threads.

lowkey the last one is the big vibe check: no forking, no threads, that's just how it is 😭

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

socketwatch is part of mswatch(1); mswatch website: http://mswatch.sf.net/ — go say hi to the family 🧚

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Written by Chris Frost <chris@frostnet.net>. 🍓

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and that's the whole page, bestie ✨ this was socketwatch(1) from the General Commands Manual — mwah, go watch some sockets, stay hydrated, and remember: no network activity for too long and she will end you 🔥💜