Multicast Receive Script
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I use socat
to debug mutlicast traffic, though the syntax for it is complicated to learn. Here is the command that I normally use to debug multicast traffic.
socat UDP4-RECVFROM:"$port",ip-add-membership="$multicast_address":0.0.0.0,fork -
This says to:
- Listen to UDP traffic from
$port
. - Subscribe to
$multicast_address
. 0.0.0.0
means to do it from the interface that matches the routing table for the multicast address.- The rest makes it print the traffic to standard out.
To make life easier I created a little script called mrecv
that takes a multicast address and port and forms the socat command for me.
#!/bin/bash
show_usage() {
echo "Usage: mrecv [multicast_address] [port]"
exit 1
}
contains_help_flag() {
if [ "$1" = "-h" ] || [ "$1" = "--help" ]; then
return 0
fi
return 1
}
if [ "$#" -ne 2 ] ||
contains_help_flag "$1" ||
contains_help_flag "$2"; then
show_usage
fi
multicast_address="$1"
port="$2"
socat UDP4-RECVFROM:"$port",ip-add-membership="$multicast_address":0.0.0.0,fork -