Netstat Sucks!!!

Well.. at least the following version of netstat sucks:

netstat 1.42 (2001-04-15) Fred Baumgarten, Alan Cox, Bernd Eckenfels, Phil Blundell, Tuan Hoang and others

At first glimpse, netstat works just fine. In fact, if you have less than 12 digits in the ip addresses you are looking at, you will probably never notice a problem. Unfortunately, the servers I'm usually working on has 12 digits. Have a look at the following output line from netstat.

tcp 0 0 ::ffff:217.116.236.191:25 ::ffff:217.116.236.18:40280 ESTABLISHED

It looks like a connection from 217.116.236.18 to 217.116.236.191. Unfortunately, thats not the case. In this case, it was a connection from .185. So what happened? Well, somebody in the group of people who wrote netstat, decided that it was more important to have nice and pretty looking columns than correct data. So they actually crop the ip address if the ip and port data doesn't fit the column width.

I really can't see any good reason for doing this.... netstat sucks!